Research on Problem-Solving Systems.
Abstract
Research on planning and problem-solving systems was begun at SRI International in September 1979 under AFOSR sponsorship. The present report describes the research conducted during the past year. This program developed powerful methods of representing, generating, and executing hierarchical plans that contain parallel actions. Execution involves monitoring the state of the world and, possibly, replanning if things do not proceed as expected. Over the last few years SRI has designed and implemented a system, called SIPE (System for Interactive Planning and Execution Monitoring), the purpose of which is to demonstrate the heuristic adequacy of our approach to this problem. SRI's basic approach is to work within the heuristic-planning methodology, representing plans in procedural networks - as has been done in NOAH7 and other systems. Several extensions of previous planning systems have been implemented, including the development of a perspicuous formalism for describing operators and objects, the use of constraints for the partial description of objects, the creation of mechanisms that permit concurrent exploration of alternative plans, the incorporation of heuristics for reasoning about resources, and an implementation of a deductive capability. Research this year has concentrated on interfacing the abstract, high-level plans produced by SIPE with the low-level information used by the sensors and effectors that might interact with the real world (e.g., those installed on a robot vehicle). This has compelled us to add extensions to SIPE.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 22, 1985
- Accession Number
- ADA162095
Entities
People
- David E. Wilkins
Organizations
- SRI International