Treatment planning is time-consuming and the outcome depends on the person performing the optimization. A system that automates treatment planning could potentially reduce the manual time required for optimization and could also provide a method to reduce the variation between persons performing radiation dose planning (dosimetrist) and potentially improve the overall plan quality. This study e...

EEciency dictates that plans for large-scale distributed activities be revised incrementally, with parts of plans being revised only if the expected utility of identifying and revising the subplans improve on the expected utility of using the original plan. The problems of identifying and reconsidering the subplans aaected by changed circumstances or goals are closely related to the problems of...

We develop a domain-independent action selection mechanism for planning with sensing that does not build full contingent plans but just chooses the action to do next in a closedloop fashion. For this to work, the mechanism must be fast and informed. We take advantage of recent ideas that allow delete and precondition-free contingent problems to be converted into conformant problems, and conform...

Macros have a long-standing role in planning as a tool for representing repeating subsequences of operators. Macros are useful both for guiding search towards a solution and for representing plans compactly. In this paper we introduce automata plans which consist of hierarchies of finite state automata. Automata plans can be viewed as an extension of macros that enables parametrization and bran...

INTRODUCTION The State Plan Index is an evaluation instrument that uses a Likert scale to assess 60 indicators of the quality of state public health plans. The State Plan Index was needed to enable evaluation of plans that were developed using a variety of public health planning models. METHODS Federal, state, and academic partners participated in developing and testing the instrument. The au...

INTRODUCTION Implicit in public health planning models is the assumption that good public health plans lead to good programs, and good programs lead to desired health outcomes. Despite considerable resources that are devoted to developing plans, public health agencies and organizations have lacked a tool for evaluating the finished product of their planning efforts -- the written plan itself --...