Declarative Interaction through Interactive Planners

Recent progress in planning has enabled this technique to be applied to some significant real-world problems, including the construction of intelligent user interfaces. Previous research in interactive planners has emphasised their dynamism and maintenance advantages. This paper adopts a user-interaction perspective, and explores the theme that a paradigm shift in human-computer interaction is now a prospect: away from the requirement to instruct machines towards a more declarative, goal-based form of interaction. This initiative necessarily involves consideration of the design of goal description languages, and some alternatives are analysed. Some implementation issues involved with embedding planners within a user interface management system are examined. The general planning strategy of constructing executable models of causality within some domain is discussed in the context of human-computer interaction specification methods. Some advantages of planners in contrast to process algebras are described, and it is also shown how Petri nets could usefully incorporate some initiatives from planning research.