Help me make a dinner! Challenges when assisting humans in action planning

A promising field of application for cognitive technical systems is individualised user assistance for complex tasks. Here, a companion system usually uses an AI planner to solve the underlying combinatorial problem. Often, the use of a bare black-box planning system is not sufficient to provide individualised assistance, but instead the user has to be able to control the process that generates the presented advice. Such an integration guarantees that the user will be satisfied with the assistance s/he is given, trust the advice more, and is thus more likely to follow it. In this paper, we provide a general theoretical view on this process, called mixed-initiative planning, and derive several research challenges from it.