Ricerc@Sapienza

In the era of Big Data and Internet-of-Things (IoT), all real-world environments are gradually becoming cyber-physical (e.g., emergency management, healthcare, smart manufacturing, etc.), with the presence of connected devices and embedded ICT systems (e.g., smartphones, sensors, actuators) producing huge amounts of data and events that influence the enactment of the Cyber Physical Processes (CPPs) enacted in such environments.

Cyber Physical Processes (CPPs) refer to a new generation of business processes enacted in many application environments (e.g., emergency management, smart manufacturing, etc.), in which the presence of Internet-of-Things devices and embedded ICT systems (e.g., smartphones, sensors, actuators) strongly influences the coordination of the real-world entities (e.g., humans, robots, etc.) inhabitating such environments.

We present a hybrid discrete-continuous extension of Reiter’s temporal situation calculus, directly inspired by hybrid systems in control theory. While keeping to the foundations of Reiter’s approach, we extend it by adding a time argument to all fluents that represent continuous change. Thereby, we ensure that change can happen not only because of actions, but also due to the passage of time. We present a systematic methodology to derive, from simple premises, a new group of axioms which specify how continuous fluents change over time within a situation.

By their very design, many robot control programs are non-terminating. This paper describes a situation calculus approach to expressing and proving properties of non-terminating programs expressed in Golog, a high level logic programming language for modeling and implementing dynamical systems. Because in this approach actions and programs are represented in classical (second-order) logic, it is natural to express and prove properties of Golog programs, including non-terminating ones, in the very same logic.