Automated Space Planning

This paper both reviews current procedures and introduces new ones for the automated generation of two-dimensional arrangements. General properties of the task and some sufficiency conditions for dealing with it are identified. The treatment of these properties in existing programs are reviewed. The task is also organized into its component decision rules. One exemplification of these rules is described which utilizes the sufficiency conditions and is implemented in the General Space Planner (GSP) program in operation at Carnegie-Mellon University [3], [4]. The performance of GSP in solving a set of spatial arrangement tasks is described and some future extensions outlined. A secondary purpose of this paper is to more fully introduce this problem domain to the artificial intelligence literature . Not only is it on interesting problem class now only the province of humans, but it has wide application. Throughout the presentation, both the commonalities and disparities of this task domain with other AI tasks are explicated.