Plan Explanation through Recommendations

This paper aims to investigate an under-studied aspect of explanation, namely, its utility in helping users make better decisions. We will investigate such problems in the context of a specific explanatory setting, namely, when the user suggests the execution of an incorrect plan. Here, the system could help the user by pointing out how to update the current plan so as to avoid the failure. Such methods could be combined with existing explanatory methods to create explanations that empower users to make more effective decisions. Additionally, we will see how we could convert the problem of generating such plan recommendations into a planning problem of its own. We will ground this problem in the context of numeric planning problems and evaluate the effectiveness of the formulation in some IPC benchmark problems.

Authors

• Sarath Sreedharan Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO
• Trisha Ghali
• David E. Smith Daniel S. Weld

Keywords

• Explaining Plan Failures
• Explanations for numeric planning
• Supporting decision-making