Planning and Meta-Planning

The selection of what to do next is often the hardest part of resource-limited problem solving. In planning problems, there are typically many goals to be achieved in some order. The goals interact with each other in ways which depend both on the order in which they are achieved and on the particular operators which are used to achieve them. A planning program needs to keep its options open because decisions about one part of a plan are likely to have consequences for another part. This paper describes an approach to planning which integrates and extends two strategies termed the least-commitment and the heuristic strategies.