Introduction

This chapter deals with the design and implementation of a planning system called KAMP (an acronym for Knowledge And Modalities Planner) that is capable of planning to influence another agent's knowledge and intentions. The motivation for the development of such a planning system is the production of natural-language utterances. However, a planner with such capabilities is useful in any domain in which information-gathering actions play an important role, even though the domain does not necessarily involve planning speech acts or coordinating actions among multiple agents.

One could imagine, for example, a police crime laboratory to which officers bring for analysis substances found at the scene of a crime. The system's goal is to identify the unknown substance. The planner would know of certain laboratory operations that agents would be capable of performing — in effect actions that would produce knowledge about what the substance is or is not. A plan would consist of a sequence of such information-gathering actions, and the result of executing the entire plan would be that the agent performing the actions knows the identity of the mystery substance. Since the primary motivation for KAMP is a linguistic one, most of the examples will be taken from utterance planning; the reader should note, however, that the mechanisms proposed are general and appear to have interesting applications in other areas as well.