Scenarios as an Aid to Planning

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2

Problem Solving and Search

In many complex domains full scale detailed solutions to problems -- plans and ways to implement them -- are not possible or practical. Rather than attempt to produce such detailed solutions, we propose an alternative of using scenarios: a set of "snapshots" of the future that outline possible courses of action, actions of foreign processes, and their consequences. In this paper, we present the scenario idea and discuss its use as an aid to tactical planning. We discuss an implementation of these ideas in a Tactical Assistant to aid planning in the errand running and conflict simulation game domains and present an example illustrative of its capabilities.