"Hit it with a Planner"

3/31/2004: 10:30am - 12:00pm
10th FL Conference Room

Abstract: Planners have become remarkably effective at tackling certain kinds of problems - a collection with growing boundaries, not only in problem scale, but also in problem complexity and expressiveness. However, when is a planner the right tool for the job? When is a problem a planning problem? In this talk I intend to explore this issue, considering problem structures, the nature of planning problems and the possibilities for decomposition of planning problems. Many planning problems contain elements of scheduling, resource management, route planning, and various more specialised combinatorial problems. I will argue that it is not always the best strategy to hit a problem with a planner, even if the problem looks something like a nail.

About Derek Long: Derek Long is Reader in Computer Science at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. He has been actively researching in planning for many years, working closely with colleague Professor Maria Fox, together forming the Strathclyde Planning Group (formerly the Durham Planning Group). He and Maria Fox jointly chaired the 3rd International Planning Competition, for which they defined a significant extension of the community standard domain description language, featuring temporal structure and optimisation criteria. Derek has been directly involved in the development of several planners, including several versions of STAN and, more recently, several resource and temporal planners.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006