ZVONA%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU (David Chapman) (02/19/86)
From: David Chapman <ZVONA%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
[Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.]
Wednesday, February 26 3:00pm Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom
The Artificial Intelligence Lab
Seminar
"Adaptive Planning"
Richard Alterman
UC Berkeley
Consider the case where a planner intends to transfer airplanes. A
common-sense approach to the problem of transferring airplanes would
be to try to re-use an old existing plan: exit first airplane via
arrival gate, determine departure gate, walk to the departure gate,
and board second airplane via departure gate. In a small airport this
would work just fine. But in a larger airport, say Kennedy Airport
where there is more than one terminal, if the arrival and departure
gates were in different terminals, the plan would have to be modified
(i.e. the planner would have to take a shuttle between terminals).
The problem of adaptive planning is to refit old plans to novel
circumstances. In the case of the example above, an adaptive planner
would refit the old plan for transferring airplanes to the novel
circumstances at the Kennedy Airport. The importance of adaptive
planning is that it adds a dimension of flexibility to the
common-sense planner.
Key elements in the theory of adaptive planning are its treatment of
background knowledge and the introduction of a notion of planning by
situation matching. The talk will motivate and discuss four kinds of
background knowledge. It will describe a number of kinds of situation
difference that can occur between an old plan and the new planning
situation. It will discuss situation matching techniques that are
based on the interaction of the planner's current circumstances and
its background knowledge. An important theme throughout this
discussion will be the control of access to knowledge.