PLANNING CONTROL RULES FOR REACTIVE AGENTS

A traditional approach for planning is to evaluate goal statements ove r state trajectories modeling predicted behaviors of an agent, This pa per describes a powerful extension of this approach for handling compl ex goals for reactive agents. We describe goals by using a modal tempo ral logic that can express quite complex time, safety, and liveness co nstraints. Our method is based on an incremental planner algorithm tha t generates a reactive plan by computing a sequence of partially satis factory reactive plans converging to a completely satisfactory one. Pa rtial satisfaction means that an agent controlled by the plan accompli shes its goal only for some environment events, Complete satisfaction means that the agent accomplishes its goal whatever environment events occur during the execution of the plan. As such, our planner can be s topped at any time to yield a useful plan, An implemented prototype is used to evaluate our planner on empirical problems. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.