New paper on Planning with Norms

The paper “The Goal after Tomorrow: Offline Goal Reasoning with Norms” by Pere Pardo and Christian Straßer has been accepted for publication in JAIR.

Here’s the abstract:

Recent studies have focused on autonomous agents that can select their own goals and actions to achieve these goals, using online Goal Reasoning (GR). GR agents revise their goals and plans at execution time if unexpected outcomes occur. However, for ethical or legal agent design, even a partial execution of online plans may result in foreseeable norm violations. To prevent these violations, it is crucial to incorporate GR into the offline planning phase. We propose an offline GR system and study its relation to normative systems and deontic logics. Our main results include a characterization and comparison of the completeness classes for several offline GR planners, as well as the irreducibility of offline GR.