Conditional logic of actions and causation

  • Authors:
  • Laura Giordano;Camilla Schwind

  • Affiliations:
  • Dipartimento di Informatica, Università del Piemonte Orientale "A. Avogadro" Corso Borsalino 54, 15100 Alessandria, Italy;MAP-CNRS, École d'Architecture de Marseille, 184 Avenue de Luminy, 13288 Marseille Cedex 9, France

  • Venue:
  • Artificial Intelligence - Special issue on nonmonotonic reasoning
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

In this paper we present a new approach to reasoning about actions and causation which is based on a conditional logic. The conditional implication is interpreted as causal implication. This makes it possible to formalize in a uniform way causal dependencies between actions and their immediate and indirect effects. The proposed approach also provides a natural formalization of concurrent actions and of the dependency (and independency) relations between actions. The properties of causality are formalized as axioms of the conditional connectives and a non-monotonic (abductive) semantics is adopted for dealing with the frame problem.