Engineering Knowledge for Automated Planning
Thomas Leo McCluskey, Tiago Vaquero, Mauro Vallati · 2017
Automated planning is a prominent Artificial Intelligence challenge, as well as being a common capability requirement for intelligent autonomous agents. A critical aspect of what is called domain-independent planning, is the application knowledge that must be added to the planner to create a complete planning application. This is made explicit in (i) a domain model, which is a formal representation of the persistent domain knowledge, and (ii) an associated problem instance, containing the details of the particular problem to be solved. Both these components are used by automated planning engines for reasoning, in order to synthesize a solution plan. Formulating knowledge for use in planning engines is currently something of an ad-hoc process, where the skills of knowledge engineers significantly influence the quality of the resulting planning application. On top of that, a notion of quality of the knowledge captured within a domain model is missing; it is therefore hard to provide useful guidelines to knowledge engineers.