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European Networkof Excellence in

AI Planning

Intelligent Planning & Scheduling

An Innovative Software Technology

Susanne Biundo

University of Ulm ,Germany

Technology Information Day Ulm June 16, 2003 S. Biundo

States and State Changes

states of the world

actions

initialstate

goal state

a2a1 an-1 an

Plans

Courses of actions


Resource Assignment

states of the world

actions

initialstate

goal state

a2a1 an-1 an

Plans

Courses of actionsresources

r2rn


Planning and Scheduling

Effecting state changes

Construction Evaluation of courses of action - procedures Execution

Administration of resources Personnel Material Machines Time Cost


Actions

Synthesis and execution of plans of action

actions as to be executed by autonomous systems or virtual agents

system control

activities as to be pursued in business and production processes

process design - process control

tasks as to be performed in management and organisation processes

project design - decision support


Planning versus Scheduling

Planning

Given a task specification, generate a course of actions whose execution performs the task

select suitable actions find an appropriate ordering of these actions

Scheduling

Given a set of actions, resources, and constraints, generate a schedule for these actions that

assigns resources to actions satisfies the constraints is optimal


Intelligent Planning & Scheduling

Domain Knowledge

• Specification concepts for domain knowledge• Tool support for the construction, combination, and maintenance of models

• Assertion of correctness / consistency properties

Reasoning Services

• plan & schedule synthesis & evaluation• plan & schedule repair• plan & schedule execution• causal reasoning


Potential of the Technology

IP&S enables the development of systems of increased

• Autonomy

• Flexibility

• Robustness

• Adaptivity

declarative domain models

synthesis and reasoning procedures


Workflow Management I

Effective modelling of business processes

• generate models from business specifications

declarative representation incl. heuristics

• validate business models

reasoning about constraints and causalities

• adapt process models to changes

• represent and reason about quality criteria


Workflow Management II

Automated enactment of business process models

• integrate scheduling and resource management

• re-plan in case of failures or exceptions

• improve and adapt the process model

© Dadam and Reichert 2000


Management Assistance

Modelling of mission plans for crisis management

• integrate various kinds of tasks

management

co-ordination

communication

information acquisition

• check completeness and consistency of plans

• support the hierarchical structuring of tasks

• plan for various contingencies


THW mission at the river Oder in 1997

Tasks

logistics

construction

organisation

180 groups1562 workers > 2 months mission

Example


Modelling Concept Hierarchies

Unit

Aircraft Vehicle

ForkLift

Jeep

Truck

AllTerrainTruck

HelicopterBus

DieselForkL

ElectrForkL


Modelling Tasks and Dependencies


Plan Synthesis

Mixed-initiative generation of mission plans

• system provides task and subtask specifications

• user roughly sketches a course of actions

• system automatically refines the plan sketch

• system keeps track of causal dependencies

• user and system interact to develop the plan


Plan Execution

Mixed-initiative execution of mission plans

• system selects appropriate instance of a plan

• user accepts and initiates, rejects, or modifies

• system monitors critical parameters and resources

• system reports discovered problems

• user and system interact to repair the plan


Intelligent Web Applications I

Creating intelligent Web agents

assistance in on-line shopping

virtual travel agents

on-line banking assistants

• assembly of information from heterogeneous, distributed on-line sources

• structured, customer-specific presentation

• monitoring of information sources


Intelligent Web Applications II

IP&S for e-commerce and virtual enterprises

• on-line distributed resource management on-line supply chain management

• reconciling customers’ demands, preferences, and constraints with providers’ services, resources, and capabilities

• Semantic Web enables advanced opportunities assembly and configuration of functions through intelligent reasoning procedures


PLANET

• European co-ordinating framework for research development, and technology transfer in IP&S application areas technological areas

• Funded by the European Commission since 1998 under IST KA II

• 60 nodes from 15 countries universities research centres industrial companies


PLANET Technical Co-ordination Units

Aerospace Applications

Workflow Management

Robot Planning

Knowledge Engineering

Intelligent Manufacturing

On-line Planningand Scheduling

Web-based Applications


European Networkof Excellence in

AI Planning

The network is still open to new members

http://www.planet-noe.org

http:// european network of excellence in ai planning intelligent planning & scheduling an...

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