Hierarchical Planning

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Qiang Yang
Intelligent Planning: A Decomposition and Abstraction Based Approach, pages 163–188
Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
1997

Ever since the conception of Artificial Intelligence, hierarchical problem solving has been used as a method to reduce the computational cost of planning. The idea of hierarchical problem-solving, a well-accepted one, is to distinguish between goals and actions of different degrees of importance, and solve the most important problems first. Its main advantage derives from the fact that by emphasizing certain activities while temporarily ignoring others, it is possible to obtain a much smaller search space in which to find a plan.