A Common Knowledge Representation for Plan Generation and Reactive Execution

The ability to integrate sophisticated planning techniques with reactive execution systems is critical for nontrivial applications. Merging these two technologies is di cult because the forms of knowledge and reasoning that they employ di er substantially. The ACT formalism is a language for representing the knowledge required to support both the generation of complex plans and reactive execution of those plans in dynamic environments. A design goal of ACT was its adequacy for practical applications. ACT has been used as the interlingua in an implemented system that links a previously implemented planner with a previously implemented executor. This system has been used in several applications, including robot control and military operations, thus attesting to its expressive and computational adequacy.