This project is applying ideas developed in recent research into action languages, on the logic of causal explanation, and on satisfiability planning to the formalization and automation of reasoning tasks in a ide range of action domains. The new formalizations must take into account the possibility of complex interactions between cuncurrent actions, the role of the exact duration of an action, the role of knowledge as a prerequisite for executing an action, and the possibility of creating and destroying objects in the process of executing actions. Some of the action domains being investigated include realistic representations of the physical space in which agents move around and are significantly larger than the typical "toy worlds" that research on actions has concentrated on in the past. The result will be another step toward achieving the goals of a theory of commonsense knowledge and reasoning - the reasoning processes used by humans in everyday life, rather than just the reasoning used in mathematical theorems. www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/
