Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Classical plan preconditions implicitly play a dual role, both documenting the facts necessary for a plan to be sound and listing the conditions under which it should be used. As the closed-world assumption is relaxed these two roles begin to diverge, particularly when attempts are made to use plans in situations other than those for which they were originally constructed. Rosenschein and Kaelbling exploit one aspect of the divergence by suggesting that some logiceil preconditions can be considered in the design phase of building an agent, but "compiled away" so that the agent need not explicitly consider them [Rosenschein and Kaelbling, 1986]. W e suggest an alternative view whereby an agent can explicitly reason and learn about which conditions are the best cues for employing standard plans, and discuss the idea in the context of the Runner project.