O-Plan: The open planning architecture

摘要

O-Plan is an AI planner based on previous experience with the Nonlin planner and its derivatives. Nonlin and other similar planning systems had limited control architectures and were only partially successful at limiting their search spaces. O-Plan is a design and implementation of a more flexible system aimed at supporting planning research and development, opening up new planning methods and supporting strong search control heuristics. O-Plan takes an engineering approach to the construction of an efficient domain-independent planning system which includes a mixture of AI and numerical techniques from operations research.The main contributions of the work are centred around the control of search within the O-Plan planning framework, and this paper outlines the search control heuristics employed within the planner. These involve the use of condition typing, time and resource constraints and domain constraints to allow knowledge about an application domain to be used to prune the search for a solution.The paper also describes aspects of the O-Plan user interface, domain description language (Task Formalism or TF) and the domains to which O-Plan has been applied.