Abstract

One way to think about STRIPS is as a mapping from databases to databases, in the following sense: Suppose we want to know what the world would be like if an action, represented by the STRIPS operator ff, were done in some world, represented by the STRIPS database D 0 . To find out, simply perform the operator ff on D 0 (by applying ff's elementary add and delete revision operators to D 0 ). We describe this process as progressing the database D 0 in response to the action ff. In this paper, we consider the general problem of progressing an initial database in response to a given sequence of actions. We appeal to the situation calculus and an axiomatization of actions which addresses the frame problem (Reiter [13], Lin and Reiter [8]). This setting is considerably more general than STRIPS. Our results concerning progression are mixed. The (surprising) bad news is that, in general, to characterize a progressed database we must appeal to second order logic. The good news is that there...

Citations