In a planning problem, some of the available actions may be irrelevant for achieving the given goal. We make this idea precise by defining, for an action description in language C , when a subset of its signature is "isolated." If all fluent constants mentioned in the goal of a planning problem belong to an isolated set  then any valid solution to the problem will remain valid if we drop from it all actions that do not belong to . Furthermore, this more economical plan will remain valid if we drop all assumptions about the initial values of the fluent constants that do not belong to . Identifying isolated sets can be used to simplify the statement of a given planning problem.

PS

In IX Ibero-American Workshops on Artificial Intelligence, 71-78, 2004.

@InProceedings{lif04b, title={Irrelevant Actions in Plan Generation (extended abstract)}, author={Vladimir Lifschitz and Wanwan Ren}, booktitle={IX Ibero-American Workshops on Artificial Intelligence}, pages={71-78}, url="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab/?lif04b", year={2004} }