A Unified View of Plans as Recipes

Plans as recipes or abstract structures, as well as plans as mental attitudes that guide an agent in its planning process has been enthusiastically embraced by both philosophers and AI practitioners. They play a central role in a class of rational agents, called Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents. This dual view of plans can not only be used for eecient planning, but can also be used for recognizing the plans of other agents, coordinating one's actions and achieving joint intentions with other members of a larger collective or team, and nally recognizing the collective plans and intentions of other teams. In this paper, we start with a simple notion of execution plans and discuss its operational semantics. We progressively extend this notion of plans to recognition plans, joint execution plans, and joint recognition plans. The primary contribution of this paper is in providing an integrated view of plans that facilitate individual an collective planning and recognition.