What is Planning?

Planning is an active research area within the broader field of Artificial Intelligence. It has strong links with scheduling and optimisation research. The primary problem is the identification of sequences of actions which will achieve specified goals from specified initial conditions. Within planning there have traditionally been two themes:

• Domain-independent planning, which is concerned with the fundamental principles of planning as an activity, typically concentrating on search techniques, search control techniques and the representation and treatment, within a planning problem, of uncertainty, non-determinism, resources, time, functional interdependence and other issues.
• Domain-dependent planning is concerned with the application of planning within particular domains, using rich domain knowledge encoded in complex domain models. Typical concerns include the problems of knowledge acquisition and representation and the exploitation of specialist control knowledge in the production of plans and reasoning about planning processes.

Planning has been successfully applied to a range of fielded industrial applications, usually as domain-dependent planning technology that has been informed by domain-independent planning research. Fielded applications often require more than pure planning technology, relying on scheduling, management of resources and other extensions which are often still beyond the range of current pure domain-independent planners.

Further planning related material and useful links can be found at the UK Planning and Scheduling Special Interest Group web-site.