A Reconsideration of Preconditions

This paper is part of an attempt to introduce intentionality of the actor to planning decisions. As a first step in this process the usual representations for actions used by planning systems must be reevaluated. this paper argues for the elimination of preconditions and qualification conditions from action representation in favor of explicit representation of intention, situated reasoning about the results of the action and reactive failure mechanisms. The paper then describes a planning system that has explicit representation and use of intentions and uses action representation that do not have preconditions.