Reasoning about actions and plans is a vital aspect of the rational behaviour of intelligent agents, and hence represents a major research domain in artificial intelligence. Much work has been undertaken to develop logic-based formalisms and problem solving procedures for plan representation and plan synthesis. This paper consists of a survey of various paradigms for reasoning about actions and plans in artificial intelligence. Attention is focused on the logic-based theoretical frameworks which have built a formal foundation for the domain-independent approaches to the general principles of reasoning about actions and plans.

Database researchers have recognized that integrating a production rules facility into a database system provides a uniform mechanism for a number of advanced database features including integrity constraint enforcement, derived data maintenance, triggers, protection, version control, and others. In addition, a database system with rule processing capabilities provides a useful platform for large and efficient knowledge-base and expert systems. Database systems with production rules are referred to as active database systems, and the field of active database systems has indeed been active. This paper summarizes current work in active database systems, and suggests future research directions. Topics covered include database rule languages, rule processing semantics, and implementation issues.

Active rules have been a standard technique in artificial intelligence (AI) for almost two decades. Variants of the Al methods are currently being adapted to provide database systems with the ability to respond reactively to events and database state changes. This paper gives an overview of developments in reactive processing database research, concentrating on active databases that are integrated with relational and object-oriented systems. A general presentation of “trigger”-based processing techniques is given, with a detailed review of active relational and object-oriented database models. An overview of technologies for active processing in AI is also presented, and some common and contrasting themes in database and AI technology identified.