Can AI planners solve practical problems?

While there has been recent interest in research on planning and reasoning about actions, nearly all research results have been theoretical. We know of no previous examples of a planning system that has made a significant impact on a problem of practical importance. One of the primary goals during the development of the SIPE‐2 planning system has been the balancing of efficiency with expressiveness and flexibility. With a major new extension, SIPE‐2 has begun to address practical problems. This paper describes this new extension and the new applications of the planner. One of these applications is the problem of producing products from raw materials on process lines under production and resource constraints. This is a problem of commercial importance and SiPE‐2's application to it is described in some detail.

[1]  Vladimir Lifschitz,et al.  ON THE SEMANTICS OF STRIPS , 1987 .

[2]  Mark Drummond,et al.  Exploiting temporal coherence in nonlinear plan construction , 1988, Comput. Intell..

[3]  Y. Shoham.  Reasoning About Change: Time and Causation from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence , 1987 .

[4]  Stephen F. Smith,et al.  ISIS—a knowledge‐based system for factory scheduling , 1984 .

[5]  David E. Wilkins,et al.  Practical planning - extending the classical AI planning paradigm , 1989, Morgan Kaufmann series in representation and reasoning.

[6]  Drew McDermott,et al.  A Temporal Logic for Reasoning About Processes and Plans , 1982, Cogn. Sci..

[7]  J. McCarthy.  Circumscription|a Form of Nonmonotonic Reasoning , 1979 .

[8]  James F. Allen.  Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals , 1983, CACM.

[9]  Raymond E. Levitt,et al.  Investigating the utility of artificial intelligence techniques for automatic generation of construction project plans , 1989 .

[10]  John McCarthy,et al.  Circumscription - A Form of Non-Monotonic Reasoning , 1980, Artif. Intell..

[11]  David P. Miller,et al.  Hierarchical planning involving deadlines, travel time, and resources , 1988, Comput. Intell..

[12]  David Chapman,et al.  Planning for Conjunctive Goals , 1987, Artif. Intell..

[13]  AMY L. LANSKY,et al.  Localized event‐based reasoning for multiagent domain 1 , 1988, Comput. Intell..

[14]  Earl David Sacerdoti,et al.  A Structure for Plans and Behavior , 1977 .

[15]  Richard Fikes,et al.  STRIPS: A New Approach to the Application of Theorem Proving to Problem Solving , 1971, IJCAI.