Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Existing planners fall into two broad categories: reactive planners that can react quickly to changes in the world, but do not project the expected results of a proposed sequence of actions, and classical planners that perform detailed projections, but make assumptions that are unrealistic when operating in a complex and dynamic world. Ideally, a planning agent in such a world should be able to do both. In order to do this, the agent has to be able to differentiate between those situations in which detailed information would aid it in making its decisions, and and those in which such information would not materially improve its performance. W e propose an approach to this problem, using well-characterized heuristics to decide what information would be useful, whether to gather it and if so, how.