On the Verification of Very Expressive Temporal Properties of Non-terminating Golog Programs

Abstract

The agent programming language GOLOG and the underlying Situation Calculus have become popular means for the modelling and control of autonomous agents such as mobile robots. Although such agents' tasks are typically open-ended, little attention has been paid so far to the analysis of non-terminating GOLOG control programs. Recently we therefore introduced a logic that allows to express properties of Golog programs using operators from temporal logics while retaining the full first-order expressiveness of the Situation Calculus. Combining ideas from classical symbolic model checking with first-order theorem proving we presented a verification method for a restricted subclass of temporal properties. In this paper, we extend this work by considering arbitrary temporal formulas. Our algorithm is inspired by classical 𝒞𝒯ℒ* model checking, but introduces techniques to cope with arbitrary first-order quantification.