Applying a General-Purpose Planner to the Problem of Query Access Planning

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Researchers have extensively studied the issues that arise in applying a general-purpose planner to the problem of stacking blocks. The interesting question is whether these are the same issues that arise in solving real-world problems. In this paper we focus on the problem of applying a general-purpose planner to generate query access plans for a multidatabase system. We identify both the representational issues and search issues that arise in applying a planner to this problem. It turns out that to represent this problem requires a representation of complex objects, ability to reason about resource constraints, and a functional interface to handle the low-level details. The search for a plan differs from traditional work in that the quality of the plans is important since there are many possible plans, and the system needs to reliably produce plans in a short amount of time.