Hierarchical Task Network planning in the Goal Lifecycle

Overview & Synopsis

Goal reasoning (GR) is the process by which intelligent agents continually reason about the goals they are pursuing, which may lead to goal change, for instance when opportunities arise, or when events cause discrepancies among expected and actual outcomes of actions planned to achieve goals. In this paper we investigate whether Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning can provide a uniform implementation of the Goal Lifecycle, a flexible process model for goal reasoning in dynamic environments. The Goal Lifecycle progressively refines goals by adding constraints to them through a series of strategies (e.g., {\it formulate, select, expand}) and uses other strategies (e.g., {\it defer, re-expand, repair}) to resolve the current goal when an event impacts it. We present a novel GR agent architecture that employs HTN planning in this Goal Lifecycle. In addition to using HTN planning for the \textit{expand} and \textit{re-expand} strategies, as is frequently done in GR and planning research, we also use it in the \textit{formulate} strategy, to obtain a uniform planning approach that provides several benefits (e.g., the possibility to formulate new goals in view of achieving higher level overarching goals). We also explain how we use an enhanced HTN action representation to process discrepancies among expected and actual action outcomes that can trigger the transition from one goal to another. Finally, we empirically demonstrate that our GR architecture enables simulated autonomous vehicles to adaptively conduct missions in dynamic environments.