Planning with Templates

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the authorâ s and shouldnâ t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.When we talk about planning with templates,we mean standard operating procedures we've learned or been trained to use for solving typical problems and as a starting point for solving novel problems. These structures contain variables relevant to an activity and current variable values that affect a problem or have been chosen in a problem-solving instance. With templates we can configure domain-independent planning algorithms, making them applicable to many different problem domains. By making the template explicit for the user in the form of a GUI, we can facilitate mixed-initiative, user-centric systems that help maintain awareness of complex and dynamic situations, share information across the network, and solve problems incrementally and iteratively

Solving Travel Problems by Integrating WEB Information with Planning

The evolution of the Web has encouraged the development of new information gathering techniques. In order to retrieve Web information, it is necessary to integrate different sources. Planning techniques have been used for this purpose in the field of information gathering. A plan for information gathering is the sequence of actions that specify what information sources should be accessed so that some characteristicts, like access efficiency, are optimised. MAPWeb is a multiagent framework that integrates Planning Agents and Web Information Retrieval Agents. In MAPWeb, planning is not only used to integrate and to select information sources, but also to solve actual planning problems with information gathered from the Web. For instance, in an travel assistant domain, plans represent the sequence of actions an user has to follow to perform his/her trip. But also, each step in the plan informs the WebAgents which information sources should be accessed. In this paper we describe MAPWeb and study experimentally two information retrieval characteristics: the average number of solutions retrieved depending on the WebAgents used and the allocated time limit, and the number of problems solved (those travel assistant problems for which at least one solution was retrieved)