Planning with Preferences

Automated planning is a branch of AI that addresses the problem of generating a set of actions 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 au - tonomous 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 specifying 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.