Third edition of Artificial Intelligence: foundations of computational agents, Cambridge University Press, 2023 is now available (including the full text).
8.1.4 Initial States and Goals
In a typical planning problem, where the world is fully observable and deterministic, the initial state is defined by specifying the value for each feature for the initial time.
There are two sorts of goals:
- An achievement goal is a proposition that must be true in the final state.
- A maintenance goal is a proposition that must be true in every state through which the agent passes. These are often safety goals - the goal of staying away from bad states.
There may be other kinds of goals such as transient goals (that must be achieved somewhere in the plan but do not have to hold at the end) or resource goals, such as wanting to minimize energy used or time traveled.
