An Introduction to Least Commitment Planning

Recent developments have clarified the process of generating partially ordered, partially specified sequences of actions whose execution will achieve an agent's goal. Thus, it should be no surprise that the quest of building intelligent agents has forced AI researchers to investigate algorithms for generating appropriate actions in a timely fashion. Of course, the problem is not yet solved, but considerable progress has been made. In particular, AI researchers have developed two complementary approaches to the problem of generating these actions: (1) planning and (2) situated action. These two techniques have different strengths and weaknesses, as I illustrate later.