Comparisons and Evaluations of Planners Signposts for the AAAI-94 Workshop.pdfVIP

Comparisons and Evaluations of Planners Signp osts for the AAAI Workshop Austin Tate Articial Intelligence Applications Institute The University of Edinburgh South Bridge Edinburgh EH HN UK There are a numb er of research activities which are contributing to improved communication classication comparison and evaluation of work on AI planners There is a closing of the gap b etween formal approaches to characterising and analysing planning algorithms and practically motivated planners many of which use detailed knowledge of the application domain in their problem solving Drummond notes that until recently the formal community have con centrated on goal achievement metho ds whereas the practical planning community have used a variety of other metho ds many of which are worthy of more detailed study We are therefore moving out from the narrower study of the truth criterion for goal achievement in planning to consider other matters which have b een imp ortant in practical planning systems for many years hierarchical and abstraction level mo dels of planning domains domain knowledge and constraints mo delling precompilation and use Search control and opp ortunism The pap ers in this workshop represent a numb er of the most imp ortant trends in comparing and evaluating planning systems Here are some themes and signp osts to b egin the pro cess of integrating many of the ideas now emerging Generic Frameworks to Describ e Actual Planners The reviews in and the tutorial in give categories of planning systems and provide denitions of the technical features within them The description of standard planner comp onents and the Plan Mo dication Op erator cyclic pro cessing abstraction in The emerging KADS mo del of planning as a generic task using Plan and Wor