Planning with Templates

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the authorâ s and shouldnâ t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties. When we talk about planning with templates,we mean standard operating procedures we've learned or been trained to use for solving typical problems and as a starting point for solving novel problems. These structures contain variables relevant to an activity and current variable values that affect a problem or have been chosen in a problem-solving instance. With templates we can configure domain-independent planning algorithms, making them applicable to many different problem domains. By making the template explicit for the user in the form of a GUI, we can facilitate mixed-initiative, user-centric systems that help maintain awareness of complex and dynamic situations, share information across the network, and solve problems incrementally and iteratively.