Abstract
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.