Rajini@ti-csl.CSNET (Rajini) (08/19/86)
Dr. Jim Hendler, Assistant Professor at Univ of Maryland, is a giving a special seminar at 10:00 am on August 28th. Abstract of his talk follows. It will be held in Conference room #2, Computer Science Center, Texas Instruments, Dallas. --Rajini rajini@ti-csl (214) 995-0779 Long-term planning systems James Hendler Computer Science Dept. University of Maryland College Park, Md. 20903 Most present day planning systems work in domains where a single goal is planned for a single user. Further, the only object changing the world is the planner itself. The few systems that go beyond this, for example Vere's DEVISER system, tend to work in domains where the world, although changing, behaves according to a set of well-defined rules. In this talk we describe on-going research directed at extending planning systems to function in the dynamic environments necessary for such tasks as job-shop scheduling, process control, and autonomous vehicle missions. The talk starts by describing the inadequacies of present-day systems for working in such tasks. We focus on two, necessity of a static domain and inability to handle large numbers of interacting goals, and show some of the extensions needed to handle these systems. We describe an extension to marker-passing, a parallel, spreading activation system, which can be used for handling the goal interaction problems, and we discuss representational issues necessary to handling dynamic worlds. We end by describing work on a system which is being implemented to deal with these problems.