Background

This chapter covers general background material for the thesis and provides a brief overview of the related literature. We defer more specific technical details and discussion of related work to the individual chapters that follow, where it can be presented in the appropriate context. Readers familiar with the situation calculus are encouraged to briefly review this chapter. While it does not present any new results, it does introduce some novel notation and definitions which will be needed later in the thesis. They are introduced here to maintain consistency of the presentation. The introductory material on the Mozart programming platform may also be helpful. We begin by introducing the base language of the situation calculus in Sec-tion 2.1, illustrated using examples from the “cooking agents ” domain. Section 2.2 introduces the Golog family of programming languages, which are the standard for-malism for representing complex tasks in the situation calculus. Reasoning about the knowledge of an agent, or epistemic reasoning, is covered in Section 2.3. Related formalisms for reasoning about action and change are briefly discussed in Sectio