Computational Considerations in Reasoning about Action.
Matthew L. Ginsberg · 1991
Any first-principles declarative planner will need to be constructed from an underlying declarative system that reasons about action. In this paper, we point out that if such a planning system is to be computationally viable, the associated declarative description of actions must satisfy at least two broad conditions. First, it will need to be event-driven, so that fluents that hold in a particular situation can be propagated into the future at reasonable computational cost. Second, it will need to be anytime in the sense that partial or approximate answers to queries can be provided in the presence of computational resource constraints. We suggest that the first these goals can be achieved by taking the truth values assigned to sentences to be functions from the temporal elements into a set of basic values, and that the second can be achieved by viewing temporal operators as functions on these functional truth values. 1 INTRODUCTION Existing planning systems can be grouped into thre...