Formalizing Reasoning About Change: A Temporal Diagnosis Approach

Johann Gamper and Wolfgang Nejdl

Abstract

In this paper we describe a framework for reasoning about temporal explanation problems, which is based on our previous work on model-based diagnosis of dynamic systems. We use an explicit representation of qualitative temporal information which provides a simpler and more natural representation than the situation calculus. We argue that a framework for reasoning about action should be able to deal with concurrent and durative actions and show how they can be represented in our system. Finally, we discuss some useful extensions such as various forms of persistency assumptions.

Keywords: Reasoning about Action and Change, Temporal Reasoning, Model-based Diagnosis

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