A Versatile Approach to Action Reasoning

The persistence problem is intimately related to the ramification problem, since the former deals those properties that do not change and the latter with those that do. Typically, tactics such as the STRIPS Assumption trivialize both problems by disallowing inferred ramifications, which at best leads to redundancy in the representation of action. This paper presents a formal theory of action based on the situation calculus that addresses the ramification problem significantly better than previous attempts, while retaining a robust solution to the persistence problem. This theory is then recast using a more general temporal model, and problems such as simultaneous actions are discussed