Automated Planning and Acting

This book is about methods and techniques that a computational agent can use for deliberative planning and acting, i.e., for deciding both which actions to perform and how to perform them, to achieve some objective. The study of deliberation has several scientific and engineering motivations. Understanding deliberation is an objective for most cognitive sciences. In Artificial Intelligence research, this is done by modeling deliberation through computational approaches to both enable it and allow it to be explained. Furthermore, the investigated capabilities are better understood by mapping concepts and theories into designed systems and experiments, in order to test empirically, measure and qualify the proposed models. The engineering motivation for studying deliberation is to build systems that exhibit deliberation capabilities and develop technologies that address socially useful needs. A technological system needs deliberation capabilities if it must autonomously perform a set of tasks that either are too diverse—or must be done in environments that are too diverse—to engineer those tasks into innate behaviors. Autonomy and diversity of tasks and environments is a critical feature in many applications, including robotics (e.g., service and personal robots, rescue and exploration robots, autonomous space stations, satellites, or vehicles), complex simulation systems (e.g., tutoring, training or entertainment), or complex infrastructure management (e.g., industrial or energy plants, transportation networks, urban facilities).