O-plan: a situated planning agent
Brian Drabble, Austin Tate · 1996
This paper describes the need to view a planner as situated in an environment dealing with the whole "planning" problem. While a planning agent deals with plan generation aspects, other agents are concerned with aspects such as task elicitation, plan analysis, reactive execution, plan repair, etc. Each of these systems has its own perspective on the planning problem and each of the systems must be capable of communicating in a way which allows other systems to assimilate new information into their perspective of the problem. Within such a collection of agents a situated planner takes task assignments from a superior agent and creates a plan or further elaborates it before passing it to the execution support agents for further processing or enactment. The paper describes the O-Plan system which has been developed as an architecture within which situated agents, such as planning agents, can be created. The paper provides a summary of work to date on the planning and execution agents. The paper then goes on to describe current research involving O-Plan which aims to address the communication between a task assignment agent and a planning agent. It concentrates on three key issues in this area: communication of plans, assessment of the quality of plans and the role of authority in the planning process.