An approach to improve argumentation-based epistemic planning with contextual preferences

Current approaches to argumentation-based planning represent an interesting proposal where defeasible argumentation is used as a practical mechanism suitable for reasoning with potentially contradictory information in dynamic environments. In many real-world planning scenarios, the development of formalisms allowing explicit preference specification over pieces of knowledge turns out to be an essential task—however, despite its importance, existing planning systems are not provided with the possibility of dynamically changing these preferences when a plan is being constructed. This paper presents an argumentation-based approach to deal with the handling of preferences when a plan is formulated; in particular, we propose using conditional expressions to select and change priorities regarding information upon which plans are constructed. Our aim is not to improve the efficiency of current planning systems, but to enhance the resulting plan itself by introducing an approach capable of representing and handling multiple preferences over defeasible knowledge. This approach will contribute to the strengthening of existing argumentation-based epistemic planning systems, providing a useful tool that the user could exploit. Finally, we also present a running-time analysis and several complexity results associated with our approach.