Using Reactive Rules to Guide a Forward-Chaining Planner

Murray Shanahan

Abstract

This paper presents a planning technique in which a flawed set of reactive rules is used to guide a stochastic forward-chaining search. A planner based on this technique is shown to perform well on Blocks World problems. But the attraction of the technique is not only its high performance as a straight planner, but also its anytime capability. Using a more dynamic domain, the performance of a resource-bounded version of the planner is shown to degrade gracefully as computational resources are reduced.