Planning for Desktop Services

A user’s interaction with a computer operating system is most commonly reflected in the use of “desktop” application programs. In this paper we investigate the prospect of building plans that link together the services provided by such applications using an inter-process communication language called DCOP (Desktop COmmunication Protocol). Such services can be used to manipulate or query desktop applications, often in a manner similar to the standard user interfaces of those applications, while offering the possibility of a practical interface that a planning agent can utilize in a real software setting. Using the knowledge-level conditional planner PKS, we show how we can construct plans for controlling a set of existing desktop applications in the open source K Desktop Environment (KDE), and illustrate our approach with a series of fully executable examples that include application control and information gathering, under conditions of incomplete information and sensing.