Exact Dominance without Search in Decision Trees
Abstract
In order to improve understanding of how planning and decision analysis relate, we propose a hybrid model containing concepts from both. This model is comparable to [Hartman90], with slightly more detail. Dominance is simple concept in decision theory. In a restricted version of our model, we give conditions under which dominance can be detected without search: that is, it can be used as a pruning strategy to avoid growing large trees. This investigation follows the lead of [Wellman87]. The conditions seem hard to meet, but may nevertheless be useful in forward-chaining situations without focus, such as [Breese87]. It may be possible to extend this work to produce better heuristic pruning based on inexact dominance and heuristic ablity. Mainly, we contribute a detailed study of particular concept in a hybrid model that is the most detailed to date, further clarifying the relation between the two main paradigms for reasoning about preference among actions.