Constructing Simplified Plans Via Truth Criteria Approximation

This paper has presented an approach to dealing with the complexity of explanation-based learning plans in complex domains. This approach uses a simplified algorithm to construct plans, and employs later refinements to repair bugs in constructed plans. This algorithm has the theoretical properties of completeness and convergence upon soundness. This incremental reasoning planning and learning algorithm has been implemented using a partial-order constraint posting planner and empirically compared to a conventional exhaustive reasoning partial-order constraint-posting planner and learning algorithm. This comparison showed that: 1) incremental reasoning significantly reduced learning costs compared to exhaustive reasoning; 2) Explanation-based Learning (EBL) duced failures from incremental reasoning; and 3) EBL with incremental reasoning required less search to solve problems than EBL with exhaustive reaoning.