Knowledge Acquisition by Generating Skeletal Plans from Real World Cases

Although skeletal plan refinement is used in several planning systems, a procedure for the automatic acquisition of such high-level plans has not yet been developed. The proposed explanation-based knowledge acquisition procedure constructs a skeletal plan automatically from a sophisticated concrete planning case. The classification of that case into a well-described class of problems serves as an instrument for adjusting the applicability of the acquired skeletal plans to that class. The four phases of the proposed procedure are constituted as follows: In the first phase, the execution of the source plan is simulated, and explanations for the effects of the occurred operators are constructed. In the second phase, the generalization of these explanations is performed with respect to a criterion of operationally which specifies the vocabulary for defining abstract operators for the skeletal plan. The third phase, a dependency analysis of the resulting operator effects, unveils the interactions of the concrete plan which are substantial for the specified class. In the forth phase, the concept descriptions for the abstract operators of the skeletal plan are formed by collecting and normalizing the important constraints for each operation that were indicated by the dependencies. With this procedure sophisticated planning solutions from human experts can be generalized into skeletal plans and consequently be reused by a planning system in novel situations.