An Abductive Procedure for Reasoning about Actions in Modal Logic Programming

In this paper we propose a modal approach for reasoning about actions in a logic programming framework. We introduce a modal language which makes use of abductive assumptions to deal with persistency, and provides a solution to the ramification problem, by allowing one-way ldquocausal rulesrdquo to be defined among fluents. We define the abductive semantics of the language and a goal directed abductive proof procedure to compute abductive solutions for a goal from a given domain description. Both the semantics and the procedure are defined within the argumentation framework. In particular, we focus on a specific semantics, which is essentially an extension of Dung's admissibility semantics to a modal setting. The proof procedure is proved to be sound with respect to this semantics.