The Use of Supervenience in Dynamic-world Planning

This paper describes the use of supervenience in integrating planning and reaction in complex, dynamic environments. Supervenience is a form of abstraction with affinities both to abstraction in AI planning systems and to partitioning schemes in hierarchical control systems. The use of supervenienee can be distilled to an easy-to-state constraint on the design of multilevel dynamic-world p "lanning systems: worldknowledge up, goals down. We present the supervenience architecture which embodies this constraint, and contrast it to thc subsumption architecture of Brooks. We describe the performance of an implementation of the supervcnience architecture on a problem in the HomeBot domain, and we conclude with a discussion of the role that supcrvenience can play in future dynamic-world planning systems.