The role of world knowledge in planning
N. S. Sridharan, Charles F. Schmidt, J. L. Goodson · 1980
Common-sense planning demands a rich variety of world Knowledge. We have examined here the view that world knowledge can be structured to form the interface between a hierarchy of action types and a hierarchy of types of objects. World knowledge forming this interface includes not only the traditional statements about preconditions and outcomes of actions, but also the normal states of objects participating in the actions and normative actions associated with the objects. Common-sense plans are decomposed into goal-directed, preparation, and the normative components. This has heuristic value and may serve to simplify the planning algorithm. The algorithm invokes world knowledge for goal customization, action specification, computation of preconditions and outcomes, object selection, and for setting up subgoals.