Abstract

In order to support a wide range of planning-related activities, we argue that plan and action representations must move to a more expressive language for goals and capabilities than is found in most current systems. A structured representation for capabilities can make explicit a hierarchy of capabilities based on subsumption, resulting in benefits for reasoning, representing, and acquiring operators and plans. By making capabilities more easily understandable to humans, such a representation can also benefit mixed-initiative approaches. We present a structured representation of capabilities and a subsumption-based matcher for it. We then describe three existing systems that use this approach in different kinds of planning tasks and tools. We finish with a discussion of how plan generation systems can benefit from using this representation.

Date

December 8, 2025

Authors

Yolanda Gil, Jim Blythe

Journal

Proceedings of the AAAI–Workshop on Representational Issues for Realworld Planning Systems