An interactive tool for plan generation, inspection, and visualization

Abstract

In mixed-initiative planning systems, humans and AI planners work together for generating satisfactory solution plans or making easier solving hard planning problems, which otherwise would require much greater human planning efforts or much more computational resources. In this approach to plan generation, it is important to have effective plan visualization capabilities, as well to support the user with some interactive capabilities for the human intervention in the planning process. This paper presents an implemented interactive tool for the visualization, generation, and revision of plans. The tool provides an environment through which the user can interact with a state-of-the-art domain-independent planner, and obtain an effective visualization of a rich variety of information during planning, including the reasons why an action is being planned or why its execution in the current plan is expected to fail, the trend of the resource consumption in the plan, and the temporal scheduling of the planned actions. Moreover, the proposed tool supports some ways of human intervention during the planning process to guide the planner towards a solution plan, or to modify the plan under construction and the problem goals.