First Year Report: Model-based Planning

This report introduces a novel approach to the execution of qualitative reasoning, by determining the stages that can be executed in parallel. The development of such a reasoner is underway and is intended to be incorporated into a distributed computing network known as the GRID. Once this reasoner has been developed, it will provide the core reasoning engine for a model-based planner. Model-based planners are particularly suited to changing worlds as they do not require explicit knowledge of the current state. A model-based planner can instead determine how to achieve a goal from a state which had not been considered previously. Allan Bruce Dept. of Computing Science