Iterative Planning with Plan-Space Explanations: A Tool and User Study
This work provides a tool and user study for human-guided iterative planning, which is useful for users who struggle to articulate their precise optimization objectives in planning tasks.
This paper addresses the challenge of eliciting user preferences in planning tasks by proposing an iterative planning process where users refine example plans. The authors developed a web-based tool that incorporates plan-space explanations, specifically plan-property dependencies, to answer user questions about why a suggested plan doesn't satisfy a desired property. A user study indicated the usefulness of these explanations in iterative planning.
In a variety of application settings, the user preference for a planning task - the precise optimization objective - is difficult to elicit. One possible remedy is planning as an iterative process, allowing the user to iteratively refine and modify example plans. A key step to support such a process are explanations, answering user questions about the current plan. In particular, a relevant kind of question is "Why does the plan you suggest not satisfy $p$?", where p is a plan property desirable to the user. Note that such a question pertains to plan space, i.e., the set of possible alternative plans. Adopting the recent approach to answer such questions in terms of plan-property dependencies, here we implement a tool and user interface for human-guided iterative planning including plan-space explanations. The tool runs in standard Web browsers, and provides simple user interfaces for both developers and users. We conduct a first user study, whose outcome indicates the usefulness of plan-property dependency explanations in iterative planning.