The Role of Deliverable Specification in Automated Process Planning

Distributed Plan and Schedule Management

Volume

Papers from the 2006 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

One of thegreatest challenges of distributed planning and scheduling is accommodating the evolving objectives and requirements of the human agents involved in the distributed process. The amount of uncertainty emanating from this source, and the risk associated with managing it, can be greatly reduced by generating a detailed specification of the final deliverable as the first step of the planning process. This specification must take into account not only the requirements and environment of the end product, but also the requirements and environment of the process itself and of the agents involved in executing it. Such a specification can be generated using an event-driven, rule-based approach to semantic modeling that captures and automates the knowledge of the process participants. This approach can also be used to quickly respond to uncontrollable variations driven by changes in the environment.