Learning from Opportunity

ABSTRACT A recent shift in perspective on planning has focused new attention on the issue of plan execution. This change of focus has opened the door to the study of execution-time issues such as opportunism and learning from expectation failure. In this paper, we present a model of opportunistic planning that uses planning-time reasoning about the opportunities that might arise during plan execution. Along with the elements of the planner that capitalize on perceived opportunities, there is a component that learns the plans for the current conjunct of goals. In earlier work (Hammond 1989a), we proposed a mechanism for learning from execution-time plan failure. Here, we suggest a corollary notion of learning from execution-time planning opportunities.