A calculus of macro-events: progress report

Abstract

The need for constraining the temporal relationships among sets of related events arises in several temporal reasoning tasks, including monitoring, plan validation, planning and diagnosis. Process constructors provide an effective way of packaging related events into individual conceptual chunks, called macro-events. In this paper, we present a first attempt at defining a calculus of macro-events that extends Kowalski and Sergot's (1985) event calculus with process constructors to express effects triggered by complex combinations of event occurrences. We apply this language to model the operations of a simple gas heater and present a Prolog implementation.