Interval Temporal Logic in General-Purpose Situational Simulations

Abstract

The need for contextually rich educational environments in construction engineering and management calls for the development of situational simulations. Situational simulations emulate real processes and provide temporally dynamic clinical exercises that expose participants to rapidly unfolding events and the pressures of decision making. A survey of simulations of construction management processes and construction operations shows that commonly used discrete event simulation paradigms are unsuitable for representing actions and events in interactive general purpose situational simulations for the construction domain. Instead, this paper argues that a definition of the situational environment using the semantics of constraint satisfaction and an interval representation of time is more appropriate for representing activities, events, actions, and situations relevant to the construction domain. This paper also illustrates how this new paradigm facilitates the implementation of a reasoning mechanism that can be used by a software agent to perceive present actions and predict the future evolution of a simulated environment.