The actor's view of automated planning and acting: A position paper

  • Authors:

  • Malik Ghallab;Dana Nau;Paolo Traverso

  • Affiliations:

  • LAAS/CNRS, University of Toulouse, France;Dept. of Computer Science and Inst. for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA;FBK ICT IRST, Trento, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

Planning is motivated by acting. Most of the existing work on automated planning underestimates the reasoning and deliberation needed for acting; it is instead biased towards path-finding methods in a compactly specified state-transition system. Researchers in this AI field have developed many planners, but very few actors. We believe this is one of the main causes of the relatively low deployment of automated planning applications. In this paper, we advocate a change in focus to actors as the primary topic of investigation. Actors are not mere plan executors: they may use planning and other deliberation tools, before and during acting. This change in focus entails two interconnected principles: a hierarchical structure to integrate the actor@?s deliberation functions, and continual online planning and reasoning throughout the acting process. In the paper, we discuss open problems and research directions toward that objective in knowledge representations, model acquisition and verification, synthesis and refinement, monitoring, goal reasoning, and integration.