Reasoning About Plans

This book presents four contributions to planning research within an integrated framework. James Allen offers a survey of his research in the field of temporal reasoning, and then describes a planning system formalized and implemented directly as an inference process in the temporal logic. Starting from the same logic, Henry Kautz develops the first formal specification of the plan recognition process and develops a powerful family of algorithms for plan recognition in complex situations. Richard Pelavin then extends the temporal logic with model operators that allow the representation to support reasoning about complex planning situations involving simultaneous interacting actions, and interaction with external events. Finally, Josh Tenenberg introduces two different formalisms of abstraction in planning systems and explores the properties of these abstraction techniques in depth.