A general framework for reasoning about change

  • Authors:
  • Juan Carlos Augusto

  • Affiliations:
  • Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahía Blanca (Argentina) and Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ ...

  • Venue:
  • New Generation Computing
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

The capability to represent and use concepts like time and events in computer science is essential to solve a wide class of problems characterized by the notion of change. Real-time, databases and multimedia are just a few of several areas which needs good tools to deal with time. Another area where this concepts are essential is artificial intelligence because an agent must be able to reason about a dynamic environment.In this work a formalism is proposed which allows the representation and use of several features that had been recognized as useful in the attempts to solve such class of problems. A general framework based on a many-sorted logic is proposed centering our attention in issues such as the representation of time, actions, properties, events and causality. The proposal is compared with related work from the temporal logic and artificial intelligence areas. This work complements and enhances previously related efforts on formalizing temporal concepts with the same purpose.