Knowledge Systems Laboratory 1985 Report No. KSL 85-6

A new method for automated planning, progressive refinement of skeletal plans, has been developed for the problem of experiment design in the domain of molecular biology. The method resulted from a study of the problem-solving behavior of scientists which showed that design usually consisted of lookup of abstracted plans followe6 by hierarchical plan-step refinement. The skeletal plan method has been implemented through two generations of problem-solving systems: the second generation involving a synthesis with the metaplanning approach of Stefik.