User-centered planning

Abstract

User-centered planning capabilities are core elements of Companion-Technology. They are used to implement the functional behavior of technical systems in a way that makes those systems Companion-able—able to serve users individually, to respect their actual requirements and needs, and to flexibly adapt to changes in their situation and environment. This chapter presents various techniques we have developed and integrated to realize user-centered planning. They are based on a hybrid planning approach that combines key principles also humans rely on when making plans: stepwise refining complex tasks into executable courses of action and considering causal relationships between actions. Since the generated plans impose only a partial order on actions, they allow for a highly flexible execution order as well. Planning for Companion-Systems may serve different purposes, depending on the application for which the system is created. Sometimes, plans are just like control programs and executed automatically in order to elicit the desired system behavior; but sometimes they are made for humans. In the latter case, plans have to be adequately presented and the definite execution order of actions has to coincide with the user’s requirements and expectations. Furthermore, the system should be able to smoothly cope with execution errors. To this end, the plan generation capabilities are complemented by mechanisms for plan presentation, execution monitoring, and plan repair.