This paper characterises the operational level of a commonsense planner. In particular it will compare two approaches on the problem of level of operation. A'plan instantiater' planner has access to a sort of summarisation of the activities involved in each of the subkinds of a (pven category of plans, and by a process of instantiation it selectively adds details to match the current planning situation.Such planners abandon the details of the lower plan and dynamically recreate the munder the exigencies of a given situation. A 'reference point' planner selects a subordinate plan, from a given category of plans, to represent the category as a whole. The reference point planner assumes a level of operation which can directly access a greater number of functional details than its plan instantiation counterpart,but perhaps at the loss of flexibility.The thrust of this paper is that reference point planners are the appropriate model of planning for the commonsense domain.

This paper describes a model for reading instructions. The basic framework is that an agent engages in an activity and resorts to using instructions only when "all else fails". That is, by reading the instructions during the period of engagement, the meaning of the instructions can be clarified by feedback from the world. This model has been implemented in a computer program, IIMP. IIMP is the instruction reading component of FLOABN (Alterman et al., 1991), an integrated architecture whose domain is reasoning about the usage of mechanical and electronic devices.

This paper discusses how the goals of a reader lead to reading as a planned activity. The external situation provides many of these goals, as well as background, which allow the reader to focus the reading activity. A system is described in which a plan for perusing a given piece of text is chosen with regard to the reading goal(s) and the structure and content of the text. As reading progresses and goals are satisfied or change, the plan is modified using adaptive planning. This model is supported by a protocol study of subjects reading instructions to use a fax machine for the first time. The main sections of this paper will: 1) describe reading in terms of a larger context of activity; 2) introduce the necessary components needed for a reader that plans; and 3) illustrate planned reading in the domain of device instructions.

Artificial Intelligence research has traditionally treated planning, execution and learning as independent, sequential subproblems decomposing the larger problem of intelligent action. Recently, several lines of research have challenged the separation of planning and acting. This paper suggests that integration with planning and acting is also important for learning. W e present an integrated system SCAVENGER combining an adaptive planner with an ad-hoc learner. Situated plans are retrieved from memory; adaptation during execution extends these plans to cope with contingencies that arise and to tease out descriptions of situations to which these plans pertain. These changes are then integrated into the plan and incorporated into memory. Every situation of action is an opportunity for learning. Adaptive planning makes learning fail-safe by compensating for imperfections and omissions in learning and variability across situations. W e discuss a learning example in the domain of mechanical devices.