The logical approach to AI ([McC59] and [McC89]) is to make a computer program that represents what it knows about the world in general, what it knows about the situation it is in, and also its goals, all as sentences in some mathematical logical language. The program then infers logically what action is appropriate for achieving its goal and does it. Since 1980 it has been widely known that non-monotonic inference must be included. The actions our program can perform include some that generate sentences by other means than logical inference, e.g. by observation of the world or by the use of special purpose non-logical problem solvers.
Simpler behaviors, e.g. actions controlled by servomechanisms or
reflexes can be integrated with logic. The actions decided on by
logic can include adjusting the parameters of ongoing reflexive
actions. Thus a person can decide to walk faster when he reasons that
otherwise he will be late, but this does not require that reason
control each step of the walking.
Situation calculus is an aspect of the logic approach to AI. A
situation is a snapshot of the world at some instant. Situations are
rich objects in that it is not possible to completely describe a
situation, only to say some things about it. From facts about
situations and general laws about the effects of actions and other
events, it is possible to infer something about future situations.
Situation calculus was first discussed in [McC63], but
[MH69] was the first widely read paper about it.
In this formalization of action in situation calculus, there are at least
three kinds of problem--narrative, planning and
prediction. Of these, narrative seems to be the simplest for
humans. A narrative is an account of what happened. We treat it by
giving some situations and some events and some facts about them and
their relations. Situations in a narrative are partially ordered in
time. The real situations are totally ordered, but the
narrative may not include full information about this ordering. Thus
the temporal relations between situations need only be described to
the extent needed to describe their interactions. Situations
occurring entirely in different places give the most obvious examples,
but even actions by the same person in the same place may not interact
as far as the inferences we draw. If we state that the traveler on
certain flight reads a book and also drinks a Coca-cola, we humans
don't need to know any temporal relations between the two events
unless they interact.
In situation calculus as it was originally envisaged (and has been
used,) events (mainly actions) in a situation produce next situations,
e.g. 
. The original theory did not envisage more
than one event occurring in a situation, and it did not envisage
intermediate situations in which events occur. However, rarely did
people write axioms that forbade these possibilities; it's just that no-one took
advantage of them.
Our present formalism doesn't really change the basic formalism of the situation calculus much; it just takes advantage of the fact that the original formalism allows treating concurrent events even though concurrent events were not originally supposed to be treatable in that formalism. Gelfond, Lifschitz and Rabinov [GLR91] treat concurrent events in a different way from what we propose here.
In a narrative, it is not necessary that what is said to hold in
a situation be a logical consequence (even non-monotonically) of
what was said to hold about a previous situation and known common
sense facts about the effects of events. In the first place, in
stories new facts about situations are often added, e.g. ``When
Benjamin Franklin arrived in London it was raining''. In the
second place, we can have an event like tossing a coin in which
neither outcome has even a non-monotonic preference.
In interpreting the following formalizations, we regard situations as rich objects and events as poor. In fact, we are inclined to take a deterministic view within any single narrative. In principle, every event that occurs in a situation and every fact about following situations is an inevitable consequence of the facts about the situation. Thus it is a fact about a situation that a coin is tossed and that it comes up tails. However, such facts are only occasionally consequences of the facts about the situation that we are aware of in the narrative.
Perhaps narrative seems easy, since it is not yet clear what facts must be included in a narrative and what assertions should be inferable from a narrative. We have however a basic model that handles some of the more basic features.