AIList-REQUEST@AI.AI.MIT.EDU (AIList Moderator Nick Papadakis) (05/24/88)
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Subject: Thesis Proposal: Approach for Flexible Reuse of Plans
Date: Mon, 16 May 88 11:15:54
From: SubbaRao Kambhampati <rao@cvl.umd.edu>
An Approach for Flexible Reuse of Plans
(Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal)
Subbarao Kambhampati
Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland
College Park MD 20742
May 31, 1988
Abstract
The value of enabling a planning system to remember the
plans it generates for later use was acknowledged early in
planning research. The systems developed, however, were very
inflexible as the reuse was primarily based on simple stra-
tegies of generalization via variablization and later unifi-
cation. We propose an approach for flexible reuse of old
plans in the presence of a generative planner. In our
approach the planner leaves information relevant to the
reuse process in the form of annotations on every generated
plan. To reuse an old plan in solving a new problem, the
old plan along with its annotations is mapped into the new
problem. A process of annotation verification is used to
locate applicability failures and suggest refitting stra-
tegies. The planner is then called upon to carry out the
suggested modifications-to produce an executable plan for
the new problem. This integrated approach obviates the need
for any extra domain knowledge (other than that already
known to the planner) during reuse and thus affords a rela-
tively domain independent framework for plan reuse. We will
describe the realization of this approach in two disparate
domains (blocks world and process planning for automated
manufacturing) and propose extensions to the reuse frame-
work to overcome observed limitations. We believe that our
approach for plan reuse can be profitably employed by gen-
erative planners in many applied domains.