Incremental planning using conceptual graphs

Abstract When performing a planning or design task in many domains it is often difficult to specify in advance what the precise goals are. It is therefore useful to have a system in which the planning process is performed interactively, with the solution approaching the users' intent incrementally through iterations of the planning process. A planning system intended to function in this way must be able to take goal specifications interactively rather than all at once at the beginning of the planning process. The planning process then becomes one of satisfying new goals as they are given by the user, modifying as little as possible the results of previous planning work. Incremental planning is an approach to interactive planning problems that allows a system to create a plan incrementally, modifying a previous plan to satisfy new or more precise goal specifications. In this paper we present an incremental planning system called the general constraint system (GCS) that is based on the conceptual programmin...