Creative Problem Solving Through Automated Planning and Analogy

As a creative problem solving strategy, analogical reasoning helps generalize and transfer solutions to new domains. Automated planners have been used for problem solving, but they reach impasses when their representation of the problem space lacks operators or resources to generate a plan from an initial condition to a set of goal conditions.

This paper presents Creative Problem Solver (CPS), a novel integration of automated planning and analogical reasoning that recognizes when analogical reasoning and generalization may resolve such impasses. CPS uses heuristics to identify missing critical resources and then uses analogical reasoning to identify suitable replacements that are readily available in the environment. We implement CPS using the CIRCA planning architecture, which supports domain-level and meta-level planning, and the structure-mapping model of analogical reasoning. This paper demonstrates CPS resolving impasses in domains where traditional automated planning would otherwise fail.