Plan Execution under Resource Consumption Uncertainty

This paper examines the problem of executing plans where there is uncertainty about resource consumption values. The amount of time, fuel or any other resource used by an action in a plan is traditionally viewed as an absolute value during a planning phase, but can be more accurately represented by a distribution of values. Current methods for plan execution cannot deal with this type of uncertainty, especially when the amount of uncertainty is large. A strategy for executing plans with these resource consumption distributions is discussed within this paper, and techniques to improve utility by exploiting opportunities are also described. Results are then presented comparing a basic greedy strategy for opportunity selection with a new technique called best expected utility.