A visual language for the acquisition and display of plans

Abstract

One of the major obstacles to the use of planning systems has been the difficulty of acquiring descriptions of how tasks are carried out in particular environments. In order to address this problem, the authors propose a visual language for the acquisition, display and debugging of this plan knowledge. The basis of this language is a model of the user's view of tasks, supported by a series of psychological experiments. DACRON supports the acquisition of plan knowledge by providing graphical representations of domain entities from the users' point of view. It will also allow users to replay the specification of plans and interactively debug this animated display.<>