Generating preferred plans with ethical features

Abstract

Normative ethics has been shown to help automated planners take ethically aware decisions. However, state- of-the-art planning technologies don’t provide a sim- ple and direct way to support ethical features. Here, we propose a new theoretical framework based on a con- struct, called ethical rule, that allows to model prefer- ences amongst ethically charged features and capture various ethical theories. We show how the framework can model and combine the strengths of these theories. Then, we demonstrate that classical planning domains extended with ethical rules can be compiled into soft goals in PDDL.