Meta-Planning: Representing and Using Knowledge About Planning in Problem Solving and Natural Language Understanding

摘要

This paper is concerned with those elements of planning knowledge that are common to both understanding someone else's plan and creating a plan for one's own use. This planning knowledge can be divided into two bodies: Knowledge about the world, and knowledge about the planning process itself. Our interest here is primarily with the latter corpus. The central thesis is that much of the knowledge about the planning process itself can be formulated in terms of higher-level goals and plans called meta-goals and meta-plans. These entities can then be used by the same understanding and planning mechanisms that process ordinary goals and plans. However, the meta-planning knowledge now enables these mechanisms to handle much more complicated situations in a uniform manner.