Model-lite Planning for the Web Age Masses: The Challenges of Planning with Incomplete and Evolving Domain Models

The automated planning community has traditionally focused on the efficient synthesis of plans given a complete domain theory. In the past several years, this line of work met with significant successes, and the future course of the community seems to be set on efficient planning with even richer models. While this line of research has its applications, there are also many domains and scenarios where the first bottleneck is getting the domain model at any level of completeness. In these scenarios, the modeling burden automatically renders the planning technology unusable. To counter this, I will motivate model-lite planning technology aimed at reducing the domain-modeling burden (possibly at the expense of reduced functionality), and outline the research challenges that need to be addressed to realize it.