From Abstract Crisis to Concrete Relief

To appear in:

Amedeo Cesta and Daniel Borrajo (editors)
Recent Advances in AI Planning, Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Planning (ECP-01)
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, to appear.

Flexible support for crisis management can definitely be improved by making use of advanced planning capabilities. However, the complexity of the underlying domain often causes intractable efforts in modeling the domain as well as a huge search space to be explored by the system. A way to overcome these problems is to impose a sophisticated structure not only according to tasks but also according to relationships between and properties of the objects involved.

We outline the prototype of a system that is capable of tackling planning for complex application domains. It is based on a well-founded combination of action and state abstractions. The paper presents the basic techniques and provides a formal semantic foundation of the approach. It introduces the planning system and illustrate its underlying principles by examples taken from the crisis management domain used in our ongoing project.

Online Copy

The paper is available as PDF (232 kB)

The presentation given at ECP is available as PDF (1.34 MB)

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{biundo:schattenberg:01,
  author = {Susanne Biundo and Bernd Schattenberg},
  title = {{F}rom Abstract Crisis to Concrete Relief --
          {A} Preliminary Report on Combining State Abstraction and {HTN} Planning},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Planning (ECP-01)},
  pages = {157--168},
  year = {2001},
  note = {Preprints}}