Inheritance in automated planning
Josh Tenenberg · Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning · 1989
The use of abstraction in planning is explored in order to simplify the reasoning task of an automated agent. An extension of inheritance (ISA) hierarchies from object classes to arbitrary object relations and to the actions of an agent serves to partition a planning system into distinct levels. The problem of maintaining the truth values of assertions at different levels of representation is addressed by stating the precise relationship between the different levels. This gives rise to the following correspondence between solutions: for each abstract solution, there exist isomorphic specializations at each lower level. Thus, the presence of abstract solutions strongly constrains the size of the original search space.