Goal-Clobbering Avoidance in Non-Linear Planners

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 12

Student Abstracts

A central issue in non-linear planning is the ordering of operators so as to avoid undesirable interactions between their effects. The Modal Truth Criterion (Chapman 1987) states the conditions under which these interactions will occur. Non-linear planners use the Criterion, directly or indirectly, to promote or demote operators, or to co-designate variables, so as to avoid interactions. - This abstract describes a method, called Goal Clobbering Avoidance (GCA), to avoid some interactions in a partially-ordered plan by promoting or demoting a sequence of operators, rather than individual operators. Effectively, it simultaneously applies the Modal Truth Criterion to all operators in the sequence, using pm-compiled information about the domain.