Approaching the plans are programs paradigm using transaction logic

Abstract

Transaction logic (TR) is a formalism that accounts for the specification and execution of update phenomena in arbitrary logical theory, specially logic programs and databases. In fact, from a theoretical standpoint, the planning activity could be seen as such a kind of phenomenon, where the execution of plan actions update a world model. This paper presents how a planning process can be specified and formally executed in TR. We define a formal planning problem description and show that goals for these problems may be represented not only as questions to a final database state, but also as the invocation of complex actions. The planning process in this framework can be considered as an executional deduction of a TR formula. As a highlight of this work we could mention that it provides a clean and declarative approach to bridging the gap between formal and real planning. The user not only "programs" his planning problem description, but also gains a better understanding of what is behind the semantics of the plan generation process.