Adjustable Autonomy for a Plan Management Agent

The Plan Management Agent PMA is an intel ligent software system that is intended to aid a user in managing a potentially large and complex set of plans Currently under development PMA applies AI technology for modeling and reason ing about plans and processes to the development of automated support for work activities We have developed and implemented algorithms for reasoning about richly expressive plans which in clude explicit temporal constraints temporal un certainty and observation actions and conditional branches We have also developed and imple mented an approach to computing the cost of a new plan in the context of existing commitments The current version of PMA has a low level of au tonomy it makes suggestions to its user but it does not directly act on her behalf In this pa per we rst describe the PMA system and then brie y raise some design questions we will need to address as we increase the level of PMA s auton omy and have it vary with the situation