Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.