Interpolation of plans for time-critical adaptation

Most techniques for knowledge-based plan adaptation are search-intensive as they rely on a general search through plan libraries to find suitable items for development or adaptation. This degrades their usefulness for real-time computations. The paper states and illustrates a plan-construction technique, "plan interpolation", whose purpose is to keep the amount of searching small. It selects two past plans, and then generates a new plan by a method that is similar to "interpolation" in the sense of numerical analysis. The approach and its details are illustrated by reference to examples drawn from the domain of ground operations control in an airport. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.