The paper presents an approach for reasoning about potential causality in plans authored directly by humans in a mixed initiative framework. The approach uses only the temporal ordering of the actions and the task structure of the plan. The term potential is used to emphasize the uncertainty in the causal ordering since no requirement is made on the existence of a complete domain theory as in standard partial order planning. The core contribution of the paper is a formalization and algorithm for extracting a parsimonious description of a potential causality relation, which is presented to the modeler as a representation of the candidate space of sets of causal links consistent with the authored plan. The paper also discusses an implemented system based on this algorithm, and its application in the context of execution.The research reported here was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Air Force Research Laboratory under contract No. F30602-00-C-0038. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the official policy or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of any of the above organizations or any person connected with them.
['Yousri El Fattah']
Potential causality in mixed initiative planning