Planning with preferences

Abstract

Automated planning is a branch of AI that addresses the problem of generating a set oractions to achieve a specified goal state, given an initial state of the world. It is an active area of research that is central to the development of intelligent agents and autonomous robots. In many real-world applications, a multitude of valid plans exist, and a user distinguishes plans of high quality by how well they adhere to the user's preferences. To generate such high-quality plans automatically, a planning system must provide a means of speciffing the user's preferences with respect to the planning task, as well as a means of generating plans that ideally optimize these preferences. In the last few years, there has been significant research in the area of planning with preferences. In this article we review current approaches to preference representation for planning as well as overviewing and contrasting the various approaches to generating preferred plans that have been developed to date. Copyright © 2008, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.