In: "Computational Logic: Logic Programming and Beyond - Essays in Honour of Robert A. Kowalski", Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 2408, pub. Springer Verlag, 2002, pages 452–490. Some Alternative Formulations of the Event Calculus Rob Miller1 and Murray Shanahan2 1 University College London, London WC1E 6BT, U.K.
[email protected] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uczcrsm/ 2 Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London SW7 2BT, U.K.
[email protected] http://www-ics.ee.ic.ac.uk/~mpsha/ Abstract. The Event Calculus is a narrative based formalism for rea- soning about actions and change originally proposed in logic program- ming form by Kowalski and Sergot. In this paper we summarise how variants of the Event Calculus may be expressed as classical logic ax- iomatisations, and how under certain circumstances these theories may be reformulated as “action description language” domain descriptions using the Language . This enables the classical logic Event Calculus to E inherit various provably correct automated reasoning procedures recently developed for . E 1 Introduction The “Event Calculus” was originally introduced by Bob Kowalski and Marek Ser- got [33] as a logic programming framework for representing and reasoning about actions (or events) and their effects, especially in database applications. Since then many alternative formulations, implementations and applications have been developed. The Event Calculus has been reformulated in various logic program- ming forms (e.g. [11], [12], [21], [23], [29], [53], [58], [71], [72], [73],[74]), in classical logic (e.g. [62], [42], [43]), in modal logic (e.g. [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]) and as an “action description language” ([21], [22]).