Automated Tactical Decision Planning Model with Strategic Values
  Guidance for Local Action-Value-Ambiguity
  In many real-world planning problems, action's impact differs with a place,
time and the context in which the action is applied. The same action with the
same effects in a different context or states can cause a different change. In
actions with incomplete precondition list, that applicable in several states
and circumstances, ambiguity regarding the impact of the action is challenging
even in small domains. To estimate the real impact of actions, an evaluation of
the effect list will not be enough; a relative estimation is more informative
and suitable for estimation of action's real impact. Recent work on
Over-subscription Planning (OSP) defined the net utility of action as the net
change in the state's value caused by the action. The notion of net utility of
action allows for a broader perspective on value action impact and use for a
more accurate evaluation of achievements of the action, considering inter-state
and intra-state dependencies. To achieve value-rational decisions in complex
reality often requires strategic, high level, planning with a global
perspective and values, while many local tactical decisions require real-time
information to estimate the impact of actions. This paper proposes an offline
action-value structure analysis to exploit the compactly represented
informativeness of net utility of actions to extend the scope of planning to
value uncertainty scenarios and to provide a real-time value-rational decision
planning tool. The result of the offline pre-processing phase is a compact
decision planning model representation for flexible, local reasoning of net
utility of actions with (offline) value ambiguity. The obtained flexibility is
beneficial for the online planning phase and real-time execution of actions
with value ambiguity. Our empirical evaluation shows the effectiveness of this
approach in domains with value ambiguity in their action-value-structure.
