Reasoning with Plans: Inference of Semantic Relationships Among Plans About Urban Development

Plans;Interdependence;Organizations;Intentions;Substitutability

Kaza, Nikhil

关键词: Plans;    Interdependence;    Organizations;    Intentions;    Substitutability;   

Others  :  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/5129/Kaza_Dissertation.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y

美国|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Plans have been considered the end products of planning activity, and researchhas focused on how plans are made. Careful thought has not been accorded tohow plans are used, after they are made, in reasoning about and choosing howto act. In any given situation, various organisations make plans, some of whichhave overlapping scopes and intersecting intentions. As a result, the actions consideredin these plans have semantic relationships such as substitutability, interdependence,and contingency with one another. The purpose of this dissertationis to identify and explain the semantic relationships between actions within andamong plans to better understand how to reason with plans and about actions.The thesis defended is that it is useful and possible to reason from multiple planswhen deciding what to do. A plan contains information about interdependenciesand uncertainties of multiple decisions and actions considered by an actor.These relationships are not limited to actions within one’s own purview. One hasto consider also the effects of others’ actions and intentions on one’s own. Sincea single plan cannot account for all these interdependencies even for one actor,every actor should consider multiple plans–both plans of her own and those ofothers–in making decisions.This dissertation examines the various plans made over time by various organisationsin McHenry and Champaign counties in Illinois. Relationships betweeniiactions within and among multiple plans can be discovered using attributes ofactions and the configurations of actions within a single plan so that they canbe considered in future planning and decision making. It builds upon multipledisciplines and methodologies to represent actions, situations, intentions, andrelationships among them.Simple databases based on real situations were used to demonstrate that theserelationships can be encoded and queried in reasoning with plans. The resultsdemonstrated that previously discovered semantic relationships can be used todiscover additional relationships across plans thereby enriching the decision making.The approach provides a systematic way of structuring the information inplans so that reasoning about relationships among actions across multiple plansis possible.