The Strathclyde Planning Group (SPG)

DYNAPLAN: Construction of a planner to work with continuous processes and their interaction with events and discrete actions. (Fox, Long, Coles, Smith, Bell)
EVORULES: The evolution, generalisation and exploitation of control rules for planning (Levine, Fox, Long, Galea and Lindsay)
The group has developing links with Marine Science research, following a visit by Maria Fox to Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and also to the Scottish Association for Marine Science at Dunstaffnage. This work is examining the application of the learning and monitoring techniques developed from Maria's LAAS sabbatical visit in 2003.
We are working in a project that seeks to monitor livestock health using a variety of techniques including our learning and monitoring technology (Fox, Long and Mugambi).
Work on searching for near symmetry in graphs (Fox, Long and Porteous).
Extension of PDDL to incorporate temporal and metric expressions (Maria Fox, Derek Long and Richard Howey).
The identification and exploration of symmetry in planning problems (Maria Fox, Derek Long and Julie Porteous).
PPARC CREST-funded Autonomous Scientist Project: We are partners in this project which is looking at the development of autonomous control techniques to support remote landers in acquiring scientific data on Mars and elsewhere. (Long)
ExoMars related work: planning for space applications, including potential autonomous plan-repair on-board a remote planetary lander (Long).

Strathclyde Planning Group Activities

The SPG holds weekly group seminars. The meetings are usually a lively discussion of current work within and outside the group. Visitors are welcome and we are glad to host seminars and other meetings.

The group is (and has been) involved in a variety of external events and activities.

Recent Activities

Maria Fox and Sylvie Thiebaux are co-editors of a special issue of AI Journal on recent advances in planning.
Maria Fox, Derek Long and Rong Qu are co-editors of a special issue of the Journal of Scheduling on links between planning and scheduling.
Derek Long is an Associate Editor for Journal of AI Research.
Maria Fox was an Associate Editor for Journal of AI Research.
Derek Long is chair of the UK Planning and Scheduling SIG, which last met in Edinburgh, December 2008.
Derek Long was programme co-chair for ICAPS06
Maria Fox is conference co-chair for ICAPS07.
Derek Long is a member of the ICAPS Council and Chair of the Competition Committee
Derek Long co-organised the ICAPS06 workshop on Planning with Preferences and Soft Goals
Maria Fox co-chaired the ICAPS06 workshop on planning with constraints
Maria Fox co-organised the ICAPS05 Verification and Validation in Planning and Scheduling Workshop

A Selection of Past Activities

Alex Coddington organised the ICAPS'03 Workshop on Plan Execution

Derek Long was a programme committee member for the ICAPS'04 workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Web and Grid Services.

Maria Fox was a programme committee member for the ICAPS'04 Workshop on Integrating Planning and Scheduling and for the ICAPS'04 workshop on Connecting Planning Theory and Practice

Maria Fox organised the AIPS'00 Workshop on Domain Analysis.
Maria and Alex co-organised the AIPS'02 workshop on Temporal Planning.
Maria Fox co-chaired (with Alfonso Gerevini) the 1st International Summer School on Planning, Sept. 28th-Oct. 1st, 2000.
Derek was a speaker at the 1st International Planning Summer School.
Maria was a speaker at the 2nd International Summer School on Planning.
Derek was invited keynote speaker at SARA'02.
Derek and Maria organised the 3rd International Planning Competition (2002).
Derek and Maria presented a distinguished paper at IJCAI'01 on Generic Types in Planning.
The group is a former PLANET node. There is a wealth of useful information available in the PLANET Repository.

Grant-aided Work

The Strathclyde Planning Group has been awarded ten EPSRC grants since 1999. These are:

Grant Title	Investigators	Grant	Amount	Period	Subject
PrePlan	Fox, Long, Cresswell, Clark	GR/M54087/01	£133,037	September 99 - September 02	Extension and development of TIM.
Planform	Fox, Long, Hamdi	GR/M70568/01	£95,273	January 00 - February 02	Exploration of automatic planner configuration, using sub-solvers.
Landmark	Porteous, Cresswell	GR/R55320/01	£59,876	February 02 - April 03	Planning problem decomposition using intermediate target states.
Stopwatch	Coddington, Cresswell	GR/R91519/01	£58,977	January 03 - December 05	Temporal planning with deadlines.
Linguist	Long, Fox, Howey, Gough	GR/R89325/01	£217,157	July 02 - June 05	Further development of PDDL, domain modelling and plan execution.
Symmetry	Long, Fox	GR/S11015/01	£153,494	August 03 - Jan 07	Exploitation of symmetry in planning.
EVORules	Levine, Fox, Long	EP/D062764/1	£399,105 (FEC value £450,023)	June 06 - Nov 09	Evolving and generalising very high quality control knowledge for planning
DYNAPLAN	Fox, Long, Bell, McArthur	EP/D062721/1	£490,025 (FEC value £565,556)	June 06 - May 09	Planning in mixed discrete-continuous domains
Meta-CSP for Planning	Fox, Long, Gregory	EP/F022883/1	£490,025 (FEC value £328,644)	Jan 08 - Dec 11	Using meta-level search for efficient optimal planning.
Modelling Planning Problems	Fox, Long, Illes, Coles	EP/G023360/1	£490,025 (FEC value £343,967)	Dec 08 - Nov 12	Automatic modelling and reformulation in planning.

The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC015263.