Abstract

We pursue the perspective of Reiter that in the situation calculus one can formalize primitive, determinate actions with axioms which, among others, include two disjoint sets: a set of successor state axioms and a set of action precondition axioms. We posed ourselves the problem of automatically generating successor state axioms, given only a set of effect axioms and a set of state constraints. This is a special version of what has been traditionally called the ramification problem. To our surprise, we found that there are state constraints whose role is not to yield indirect effects of actions. Rather, they are implicit axioms about action preconditions. As such, they are intimately related to the classical qualification problem. We also discovered that other kinds of state constraints arise; these are related to the formalization of strategic or control information. This paper is devoted to describing our results along these lines, focusing on ramification and qualification state con...

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