language: en

[To Appear in AI Magazine, Summer/Fall 1994.]

An Introduction to Least Commitment Planning

Daniel S. Weld 1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
weld@cs.washington.edu

Abstract Recent developments have clarified the process of generating partially ordered, partially specified sequences of actions whose execution will achive an agent's goal. This paper summarizes a progression of least commitment planners, starting with one that handles the sim ple strips representation, and ending with one that manages actions with disjunctive precondition, conditional effects and universal quantification over dynamic universes. Along the way we explain how Chapman's formulation of the Modal Truth Criterion is misleading and why his NP-completeness result for reasoning about plans with conditional effects does not apply to our planner.

[1 I thank Franz Amador, Tony Barrett, Darren Cronquist, Denise Draper, Ernie Davis,]