OpenMIND: Planning and Adapting in Domains with Novelty

We describe OpenMIND, a goal-oriented agent that plans to achieve its goals, executes its plans,
and revises its goals and planning models on the fly when novel, unexpected situations arise. 

This general idea is not new; our contributions lie in the development of several domain-independent
model-modification and goal-reasoning heuristics that have proven effective in handling novelty,
based on blind evaluations with quantitative metrics. The metric results show that OpenMIND is
reliably able to detect novelties and then take advantage of novel opportunities and avoid or work
around novel hindrances using a small collection of domain-independent techniques. Overall, for
evaluation trials that presented novel challenges and opportunities across two different domains,
OpenMIND adapted to novelties to achieve 80% or more of the performance achieved by a baseline
agent on pre-novelty tasks in that domain.