ONYX: An Architecture for Planning in Uncertain Environments

The ONYX program is designed to fill the need for planning in application areas where traditional planning methodology is difficult to apply. While the program being developed will assist with the planning of cancer therapy, its architecture is intended to be of use whenever goals are ill-specified, plan operators have uncertain effects, or tradeoffs and unresolvable conflicts occur between goals. We describe a planning process which uses strategic information and a mechanistic model of the domain. The process consists of three steps: (1) generate a small set of plausible plans based on current data, (2) simulate those plans to predict their possible consequences, and (3) based on the results of those simulations, rank the plans according to how well each meets the goals for the situation.