Planning for Desktop Services
Ronald P. A. Petrick · 2007
A user’s interaction with a computer operating system is most commonly reflected in the use of “desktop ” application pro-grams. In this paper we investigate the prospect of building plans that link together the services provided by such applica-tions using an inter-process communication language called DCOP (Desktop COmmunication Protocol). Such services can be used to manipulate or query desktop applications, of-ten in a manner similar to the standard user interfaces of those applications, while offering the possibility of a practical in-terface that a planning agent can utilize in a real software setting. Using the knowledge-level conditional planner PKS, we show how we can construct plans for controlling a set of existing desktop applications in the open source K Desktop Environment (KDE), and illustrate our approach with a series of fully executable examples that include application control and information gathering, under conditions of incomplete in-formation and sensing.