A fundamental assumption made by classical AI planners is that there is no uncertainty in the world: the planner has full knowledge of the conditions under which the plan will be executed and the outcome of every action is fully predictable. These planners cannot therefore construct contingency plans, i.e., plans in which di erent actions are performed in di erent circumstances. In this paper w...

In this model, insurance offering a choice of hospitals is valued because consumers are uncertain which hospital they will prefer ex post. A competitive insurance market facilitates tacit price collusion between hospitals; high margins induce hospitals to compete for customers through overinvestment in quality. Incentives may exist to lock in market share via managed-care plans with less choice...

In BDI programs it is quite common to find context conditions of plans which are over-constrained in order to ensure that the most preferred plan is selected for use. This is undesirable for at least two reasons. It makes the plan not available for use at all in situations where it could be of value as a back-up plan, and also it requires incorporation of information that conceptually belongs w...

background: the increased recognition of ethical problems has contributed to the resurgence of ethics in relation to health care, and to the emergence of medical ethics as a new collaborative discipline in the world. the growing trends in biomedical technologies have been associated with increasing discussions about ethical aspects of the new knowledge in different societies. advances in geneti...

Resume We outline in this paper the following view of linguistic meanings. Meanings are planned in the course of speech. The plans, we call them discourse plans (DP), combine referential structure, cognitive situation structure and communicative structure. If and when the DP is realizable, it is transformed into a meaning, which from a technical perspective, is a second order typed lambda term....

The output of advice-giving systems can be regarded as plans to be executed by the user. Such plans are fairly useless if the user is not capable of executing some of the involved plan steps, or if he does not know them. We propose a two-phase process of user-tailored plan generation and plan presentation to produce advice that enables a user to reach his goals. This paper reports the first pha...

We are amending the National Poultry Improvement Plan (NPIP, the Plan) and its auxiliary provisions by removing the descriptions of specific tests and sanitation procedures from the regulations. Instead, we will require tests to be performed and sanitation to be maintained in a manner approved by the Administrator. Approved procedures will be listed in an NPIP Program Standards document, which ...

We present here a methodology for programming active networks in the environment de ned by our new language PLAN (Packet Language for Active Networks). This environment presumes a two-level architecture consisting of: 1. active packets carrying PLAN code; and 2. downloadable, node-resident services written in more general-purpose languages. We present several examples which illustrate how these...

MOST readers will, by now, have made themselves familiar with the Minister of Health's Plans for developing the health and welfare services over the next ten years as outlined in the Blue Book* presented to Parliament. Mr. Powell himself spoke about it at length at the Association of Municipal Corporations' Conference in Morecambe on April 13th. No doubt there will be critic'" especially of the...