The action language GOLOG has been used, among other things, for the specification of the behaviour of mobile robots. Since the task of such autonomous systems is typically open-ended, their GOLOG programs are usually non-terminating. To ensure that the program will let the robot exhibit the intended behaviour, it is often desirable to be able to formally specify and then verify the desired properties, which are often of a temporal nature. This task has been studied within our preliminary work from two perspectives: On the one hand, the problem was tackled for very expressive specification and action program formalisms, but without the goal of achieving decidability, i.e. the developed verification methods were not guaranteed to terminate. On the other hand, the verification problem was studied for action formalisms based on decidable description logics and very limited means of specifying admissible sequences of actions, which allowed us to show decidability and complexity results for the verification problem. The purpose of this project is to combine the advantages of both approaches by, on one hand, developing verification methods for GOLOG programs that are effective and practically feasible and, on the other hand, going beyond the formalisms with very limited expressiveness to enhance their usefulness. Among other things, both qualitative and quantitative temporal program properties will be addressed.

Homepage: http://www.hybrid-reasoning.org/projects/a1