A proposed AI-Planning approach for staff management in a service center.

This paper presents a new approach for task allocation in a Service Center, based on artificial intelligence (AI) planning techniques. Our objective is to build an expert system that automatically allocates tasks to technicians in a Service Center. We describe the process of building an AI planner, from the design phase up to the final implementation phase, through the example of an IT service Help Desk. We examine in particular the process of determining the most suitable technician to assign to a new service request. Our approach is based on first-order logic, situation calculus and partialorder planning, to demonstrate the use of AI planning to solve complex problems by starting with a simple high-level model, then progressively decomposing it into finer components, until the whole solution is computationally implementable. This approach enables faster determination of a solution while meeting all the goals of the Service Center management.