Meta‐Planning: Representing and Using Knowledge About Planning in Problem Solving and Natural Language Understanding

Cognitive Science 5 (3):197-233 (1981)
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Abstract

This paper is concerned with those elements of planning knowledge that are common to both understanding someone else's plan and creating a plan for one's own use. This planning knowledge can be divided into two bodies: Knowledge about the world, and knowledge about the planning process itself. Our interest here is primarily with the latter corpus. The central thesis is that much of the knowledge about the planning process itself can be formulated in terms of higher‐level goals and plans called meta‐goals and meta‐plans. These entities can then be used by the same understanding and planning mechanisms that process ordinary goals and plans. However, the meta‐planning knowledge now enables these mechanisms to handle much more complicated situations in a uniform manner.Systems based on meta‐planning would have a number of advantages over existing problem solving and understanding systems. The same knowledge could be shared by both a planner and understander, and both would be able to handle complex situations elegantly. In addition, in planning, the use of meta‐planning has several advantages over more traditional methods involving constraints or critics. Meta‐planning allows the full power of a problem solver to be applied to situations that are generally amenable only to special purpose processing. In addition, meta‐planning facilitates the representation of some situations that are difficult to express otherwise. We have begun to introduce meta‐planning knowledge into two systems: PAM, a story understanding program, and PANDORA, a problem solving and plannin̈g system.

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Citations of this work

Planning for conjunctive goals.David Chapman - 1987 - Artificial Intelligence 32 (3):333-377.
Adaptive Planning.Richard Alterman - 1988 - Cognitive Science 12 (3):393-421.
Pragmatic Action.Richard Alterman, Roland Zito-Wolf & Tamitha Carpenter - 1998 - Cognitive Science 22 (1):53-105.
Explaining and repairing plans that fail.Kristian J. Hammond - 1990 - Artificial Intelligence 45 (1-2):173-228.

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References found in this work

Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of artificial intelligence.John McCarthy & Patrick Hayes - 1969 - In B. Meltzer & Donald Michie (eds.), Machine Intelligence 4. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 463--502.
Planning in a hierarchy of abstraction spaces.Earl D. Sacerdoti - 1974 - Artificial Intelligence 5 (2):115-135.
Planning and Acting.Drew McDermott - 1978 - Cognitive Science 2 (2):71-100.

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