D. McDermott, Planning and Acting. Cognitive Science, 2, 1978.

Author of the summary: J. William Murdock, 1997, murdock@cc.gatech.edu

Cite this paper for:

• An effective planning agent must be extensible to allow for the variety of planning tasks that need to be addressed.

Keywords: Planning, Tasks, Logic

Systems: NASL, STP (neither of these are given full names)

Summary: Addresses the issue of building a generic, flexible,
planning system.  Describes a language (and an associated
interpreter, NASL) which can support not only facts and
rules in the domain (such as operators, etc.) but also
general strategic knowledge about planning such as rules for
ordering subtasks, etc.  Uses predicate calculus as a basis
for the language and uses STP (a theorem prover) for
performing basic operations.  Addresses issues such as
maintenance goals (e.g.  "remain in bounds while getting to
the goal"), resource limited goals (e.g.  "get all the
groceries without spending more than $20"), interleaving
planning with action and the associated problems of recovery
and replanning, etc.  Proposes as open issues topics such as
continuous time and problem reformulation.

Summary author's notes:

• This summary came from a file which had the following disclaimer: "The following summaries are the completely unedited and often hastily composed interpretations of a single individual without any sort of systematic or considered review. As such it is very likely that at least some of the following text is incomplete, inadequate, misleading, or simply wrong. One might view this as a very preliminary draft of a survey paper that will probably never be completed. The author disclaims all responsibility for the accuracy or use of this document; this is not an official publication of the Georgia Institute of Technology or the College of Computing thereof, and the opinions expressed here may not even fully match the fully considered opinions of the author much less the general opinions of the aformentioned organizations."