An Introduction to Least Commitment Planning
Daniel S. Weld · 1994
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 simple 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, Oren Etzioni, Nort Fowler, Rao Kambhampati, Craig Knoblock, Nick Kushmerick, Neal Lesh, Karen Lochbaum, Drew McDermott, Ramesh Patil, Kari Pulli, Ying Sun, Austin Tate and Mike Williamson for helpful comments, but retain sole responsibility for errors. This res...