Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing: Behavioral ... - Arteimi.info

12
Intelligent
Planning
This chapter provides an exhaustive survey of the various planning strategies,
employed to complex decision-making problems. It begins with a formal
introduction to forward and backward chaining methods for planning. The
forward or backward chaining schemes exhibit exponential growth of the
search space and thus are of limited use. An alternative scheme for planning
based on the principles of ‘least commitment’ is then introduced. The abstract
classification of a planning problem by a hierarchical approach and its
possible expansion to primitive (elementary) plans is covered next in the
chapter. The chapter also provides a brief discussion on ‘multi-agent
planning’. The principles of heuristic planning have also been illustrated here
with a ‘flow-shop scheduling’ problem.
12.1 Introduction
The word ‘planning’ informally refers to the generation of the sequence of
actions to solve a complex problem. For instance, consider the problem of
placing the furniture in your new-built house, so that i) you can fully utilize
the available free space for common use and ii) the rooms look beautiful. An
analysis of the problem reveals that there exist many possible alternative
solutions to the problem. But finding even a single solution is not so easy.
Naturally, the question arises: why? Well, to understand this, we explore the
problem a little more.