Dynamic Worlds

Reasoning is an integral part of intelligent systems in fields like databases, logic programming, robotics, knowledge engineering, human/computer interfaces, and programming environments. In reality any such system has to cope with a changing world and its dynamics. Hence it is of great importance that reasoning must account for coping with change in order to be truly useful in practice. This text comprises several contributions to current ways of approaching this problem. On the one hand it surveys and synthesizes past research work, while on the other hand new research results are included. Among the topics treated are logics for reasoning about actions and planning, belief revision and the reconciliation of logically conflicting inputs, resolving of conflicts by merging of knowledge and issues in the evolution in object-oriented databases. The book is aimed at the researcher and advanced student active in this field.