Continual On-Line Planning

My research proposes an approach to integrating planning and execution in time-sensitive environments, a setting I call continual on-line planning. New goals arrive stochastically during execution, the agent issues actions for execution one at a time, and the environment is otherwise deterministic. My dissertation will address this setting in three stages: optimizing total goal achievement time, handling on-line goal arrival, and adapting to exogenous changes in state. My approach to these problems is based on incremental heuristic search. The two central issues are the decision of which partial plans to elaborate during search and the decision of when to issue an action for execution. I propose an extension of Russell and Wefald’s decision-theoretic A* algorithm to inadmissible heuristics. This algorithm, Decision Theoretic On-line Continual Search (DTOCS), handles the complexities of the on-line setting by balancing deliberative planning and real-