Globally linear connection method

To model in a formal system the remarkable ability of human agents to reason about situations, actions, and causality has always been a major research goal in Intellectics. Most of the work towards this goal is based on the situation calculus which, however, has the disadvantage that it requires either to state frame axioms or to use non-monotonic logic and a commonsense law of inertia. A deductive approach which does not show this disadvantage is the linear connection method whose key idea is to treat facts about a situation as resources which can be consumed and produced by actions. It was shown that this approach properly handles planning problems which only allow deterministic actions, i.e. actions which are not allowed to have several alternative effects. In this paper we extend and revise the linear connection method to overcome this restriction.