Least-Commitment Action Selection

The principle of least commitment was embraced early in planning research. Hierarchical task networks (HTNs)reason about high-level tasks without committing to specific low-level steps. Partial-order planning arose from a complementary desire to avoid unnecessary ordering commitments. But most of today's partial-order planning algorithms committo a single producing step whensupporting an open condition -even whenmultiple alternatives exist. Each possibility results in a different child plan, and therefore a branch in the search tree. If the various choices have commonfeatures, computation may be duplicated unnecessarily on the various branches. The FABIANplanner attempts to avoid such waste. FABIANseparates the decision to add a step from the choice of which step to add. FABIANsupports an open condition by adding an abstract action to the plan representing the disjunction of possible newsupporting steps; only later does it refine this choice to a particular concrete action. We sh...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: AIPS
• Authors: Marc Friedman, Daniel S. Weld
• Keywords: AIPS 1996, Artificial Intelligence, Open Condition, Partial-order Planning, Specific Low-level Steps