Planning is a natural domain of application for frameworks of reasoning about
actions and change. In this paper we study how one such framework, the Language
E, can form the basis for planning under (possibly) incomplete information. We
define two types of plans: weak and safe plans, and propose a planner, called
the E-Planner, which is often able to extend an initial weak plan into a safe
plan even though the (explicit) information available is incomplete, e.g. for
cases where the initial state is not completely known. The E-Planner is based
upon a reformulation of the Language E in argumentation terms and a natural
proof theory resulting from the reformulation. It uses an extension of this
proof theory by means of abduction for the generation of plans and adopts
argumentation-based techniques for extending weak plans into safe plans. We
provide representative examples illustrating the behaviour of the E-Planner, in
particular for cases where the status of fluents is incompletely known.Comment: Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic
Reasoning, April 9-11, 2000, Breckenridge, Colorad