Recent advances in AI planning : 5th European Conference on Planning, ECP'99, Durham, UK, September 8-10, 1999 : proceedings

TheEuropeanConferencesonPlanning(ECP)areamajorforumforthepres- tation of new research in Arti?cial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling. They developed from a series of European workshops and became successfully es- blished as international meetings. Previous conferences took place in St. Au- stin (Germany) in 1991, Vadstena (Sweden) in 1993, Assisi (Italy) in 1995, and Toulouse (France) in 1997. ECP-99 was held in Durham, United Kingdom. The conference received s- missions from all over Europe, from the US, Canada, South America, and New Zealand. This volume contains the 27 papers that were presented at the conference. They cover a variety of aspects in current AI Planning and Scheduling. Several p- minent planning paradigms are represented, including planning as satis?ability andothermodelcheckingstrategies, planningasheuristicstate-spacesearch, and Graphplan-Based approaches. Moreover, various new scheduling approaches and combinations of planning and scheduling methods are introduced. Inadditiontotheconferencepapers, threeinvitedtalkswerepresentedbydist- guished researchers of the ?eld: Fausto Giunchiglia (IRST Trento, Italy) gave an introduction to Planning as Model Checking. The corresponding paper by F- sto Giunchiglia and Paolo Traverso is included in this volume. Claude Le Pape (BouyguesTelecom, France)presentedConstraint-BasedScheduling: Theoryand Applications, and Nicola Muscettola (NASA Ames, USA) talked aboutPlanning at 96 Million Kilometers from Earth. ECP-99 received support fromPLANET, the European Network of Excellence in AI Planning, the University of Durham, United Kingdom, and the University of Ulm, Germany. Frontmatter Planning as Model Checking Conformant Planning via Model Checking Strong Cyclic Planning Revisited Scaleability in Planning Exploiting Competitive Planner Performance A Parallel Algorithm for POMDP Solution Plan Merging \& Plan Reuse as Satisfiability SAT-Based Procedures for Temporal Reasoning Numeric State Variables in Constraint-Based Planning Hierarchical Task Network Planning as Satisfiability Exhibiting Knowledge in Planning Problems to Minimize State Encoding Length Action Constraints for Planning Least Commitment on Variable Binding in Presence of Incomplete Knowledge Scaling up Planning by Teasing Out Resource Scheduling Real-Time Scheduling for Multi-agent Call Center Automation Task Decomposition Support to Reactive Scheduling Greedy Algorithms for the Multi-capacitated Metric Scheduling Problem Automata-Theoretic Approach to Planning for Temporally Extended Goals Integer Programs and Valid Inequalities for Planning Problems Deductive Synthesis of Recursive Plans in Linear Logic Sensor Planning with Non-linear Utility Functions {\sf Propice-Plan}: Toward a Unified Framework for Planning and Execution What is the Expressive Power of Disjunctive Preconditions? Some Results on the Complexity of Planning with Incomplete Information Probabilistic Planning in the Graphplan Framework Making Graphplan Goal-Directed GRT: A Domain Independent Heuristic for STRIPS Worlds Based on Greedy Regression Tables Planning as Heuristic Search: New Results Backmatter

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Planning, ECP'99, held in Durham, UK, in September 1999.
The 27 revised full papers presented together with one invited survey were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. They address all current aspects of AI planning and scheduling. Several prominent planning paradigms are represented, including planning as satisfiability and other model checking strategies, planning as heuristic state-space search, and Graph-plan-based approaches. Moreover, various new scheduling approaches and combinations of planning and scheduling methods are introduced.

The key idea underlying the Planning as Model Checking paradigm is that planning problems should be solved model-theoretically.