The nonlinear nature of plans

  • Authors:
  • Earl D. Sacerdoti

  • Affiliations:
  • Artificial Intelligence Center, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'75 Proceedings of the 4th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 1975

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Abstract

We usually think of plans as linear sequences of actions. This is because plans are usually executed one step at a time. But plans themselves are not constrained by limitations of linearity. This paper describes a new information structure, called the procedural net, that represents a plan as a partial ordering of actions with respec to time. By avoiding premature commitments to a particular order for achieving subgoals, a problem-solving system using this representation can deal easily and directly with problems that are otherwise very difficult to solve.