Interpolation of plans for time-critical adaptation

Most techniques for knowledge-based plan adaptation are search-intensive as they rely on a general search through plan libraries to find suitable item s for development or adaptation. This degrades their usefulness for real-ti me computations. The paper states and illustrates a plan-construction techn ique, "plan interpolation", whose purpose is to keep the amount of searchin g small. It selects two past plans, and then generates a new plan by a meth od that is similar to "interpolation" in the sense of numerical analysis. T he approach and its details are illustrated by reference to examples drawn from the domain of ground operations control in an airport. (C) 1999 Elsevi er Science B.V. All rights reserved.