User-Tailored Plan Generation

The output of advice-giving systems can be regarded as plans to be executed by the user. Such plans are fairly useless if the user is not capable of executing some of the involved plan steps, or if he does not know them. We propose a two-phase process of user-tailored plan generation and plan presentation to produce advice that enables a user to reach his goals. This paper reports the first phase, the generation of a plan under the constraints of the user's capabilities. The capabilities are represented as a hierarchy of plan concepts. System assumptions about user capabilities form a part of the user model, but are separate from assumptions about the user's knowledge, goals etc. With this representation, we can re-use the techniques for collecting assumptions about the user's conceptual knowledge for inferring his capabilities as well. We show an example of plan generation for users with different capabilities.