Plan abstraction based on operator generalization
John S.A. Anderson, Arthur M. Farley · 1988
We describe a planning system which automatically creates abstract operators while organizing a given set of primitive operators into a taxonomic hierarchy. At the same time, the system creates categories of abstract object types which allow abstract operators to apply to broad classes of functionally similar ob-jects. After the system has found a plan to achieve a particular goal, it replaces each primitive operator in the plan with one of its ancestors from the operator taxonomy. The resulting abstract plan is incorpo-operator, an abstract-macro. The next time the plan-ner is faced with a similar task, it can specialize the abstract-macro into a suitable plan by again using the operators with appropriate descendants. I.