Herding the Crowd: Automated Planning for Crowdsourced Planning

An emerging application of human computation concerns that all too human of activities – planning. At first glance, crowdsourced planning applications appear to have very little to do with existing automated planning methods, since they seem to depend solely on human planners. However, a deeper look at these applications shows that most of them use primitive automated components in order to enforce checks and constraints which are traditionally not the strongsuit of human workers – herding the proverbial sheep, in a manner of speaking. More importantly, experiments show that even these primitive automated components go a long way towards improving plan quality (Zhang et al. 2012), for little to no investment in terms of cost and time. While these primitive components can and should be replaced by more sophisticated automated planning techniques, adapting such technology presents several challenges. We present a general architecture that foregrounds the potential roles of an automated planner in crowd-planning, and discuss the challenges in realizing them.