STATE-SPACE APPROACH IN PROBLEM-SOLVING OPTIMIZATION.

New results are presented in the ″theory of problem-solving″ which have been developed at the Milan Polytechnic Artificial Intelligence Project in the last eight years, devoted to the understanding of the different aspects of the problem-solving process, and centered around problem representation. A formal problem-solving is proposed, called ″semantic description″ , which constitutes a framework useful to structure a rich information content about a given problem. Furthermore, a method is presented here, which is based on semantic description, and which makes it possible to extract in an automatic way, i. e. , by computation, the heurisic information useful to guide the search in the state-space.