Coming up with good excuses: What to do when no plan can be found

Abstract

When using a planner-based agent architecture, many things can go wrong. First and foremost, an agent might fail to execute one of the planned actions for some reasons. Even more annoying, however, is a situation where the agent is incompetent, i.e., unable to come up with a plan. This might be due to the fact that there are principal reasons that prohibit a successful plan or simply because the task's description is incomplete or incorrect. In either case, an explanation for such a failure would be very helpful. We will address this problem and provide a formalization of coining up with excuses for not being able to find a plan. Based on that, we will present an algorithm that is able to find excuses and demonstrate that such excuses can be found in practical settings in reasonable time. Copyright © 2010, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.