Paths of least resistance in possibilistic production systems (Q1081513)

The author proposes a new idea of possibilistic production systems. Such a system is defined in terms of states and possibilistic production rules for the transition between states. The problem of concern to the author is that of starting from a given initial state and finding a path via application of the production rules which leads to a goal state such that the overall possibility measure on this path is maximal. The author provide a general algorithm for finding a path from an initial node to a goal node. He introduces a heuristic evaluation function and shows that this function - based upon the difficulty of going from any point in the tree to a goal node - plays a significant role in the reduction of the computational explosion.