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Knowledge in action. Logical foundations for specifying and implementing dynamical systems. (English) Zbl 1018.03022

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. xvi, 424 p. (2001).
Publisher’s description: Modeling and implementing dynamical systems is a central problem in artificial intelligence, robotics, software agents, simulation, decision and control theory, and many other disciplines. In recent years, a new approach to representing such systems, grounded in mathematical logic, has been developed within the AI knowledge-representation community.
This book presents a comprehensive treatment of these ideas, basing its theoretical and implementation foundations on the situation calculus, a dialect of first-order logic. Within this framework, it develops many features of dynamical systems modeling, including time, processes, concurrency, exogenous events, reactivity, sensing and knowledge, probabilistic uncertainty, and decision theory. It also describes and implements a new family of high-level programming languages suitable for writing control programs for dynamical systems. Finally, it includes situation calculus specifications for a wide range of examples drawn from cognitive robotics, planning, simulation, databases, and decision theory, together with all the implementation code for these examples. This code is available on the book’s Web site.

MSC:

03B70 Logic in computer science
68T30 Knowledge representation
68T27 Logic in artificial intelligence
03-02 Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to mathematical logic and foundations
68-02 Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to computer science
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