Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Solving the multiple goals problem has been a major issue in Artificial Intelligence models of planning (Sussman, 1975; Sacerdoti, 1975; Wilensky, 1978; Wilensky, 1980; Wilensky, 1983; Carbonell, 1979); however, most models have assumed that the best plan for a set of goals to be satisfied in coivj unction will zirise from a simple combination of the best individual plans for each goal. However, human planners seem to possess an ability to look at a set of goals, and charMterize them as a whole, instezui of as a collection of individual goals (Hayes-Roth and Hayes-Roth, 1979). In this paper, we introduce the notion of indexing complex multiple-goal plans in terms of the interactions between the goals that they satisfy. W e present the vocabulary requirements for representing the causality behii^ goal interactions, the general planning strategies used to resolve these interactions, and the specific plans based on these more general resolution strategies that are instantiated in the actual planning problem.