European Network of Excellence in AI Planning The PLANET Roadmap on AI Planning and Scheduling

Preface Planning and Scheduling is the field of Artificial Intelligence that is concerned with all aspects of the system-supported or fully automated synthesis, execution, and monitoring of courses of actions, activities, and tasks. With that, it provides a technology for increasing the autonomy of systems by making them more flexible, robust, and adaptive. Consequently, it has a particularly large application potential in a variety of industrial and administrative areas including the growing e-business and e-work sectors. This road map document aims to take stock of current exploitation of the technology and points out future research and development steps for both improving the technology in current applications and widening the spectrum of future ones. The road map is joint work by members of PLANET, the European Network of Excellence in AI Planning – funded by the European Union under the Esprit The road map addresses a number of themes under the global view of aiming to extend the exploitation of the technology far beyond the current stage. To this end, two main aspects are considered: further technological developments required and a number of key application areas for various industrial and business sectors. The road map comprises five chapters. Two are devoted to methodological themes, namely Knowledge Engineering and On-line Scheduling, another three are concerned with the application areas of Robotics, Intelligent Manufacturing, and Workflow Management, respectively. Each chapter comprehensively reviews the State of the Art in the respective sector. It identifies directions for further exploitations of the technology and – guided by these – suggests improvements of planning and scheduling methodologies and techniques. Finally, each chapter provides development plans for focused research and development actions in the short-, medium-, and long-term run. Each chapter of the road map corresponds to a so-called Technical Coordination Unit (TCU) of PLANET. These units were built to provide a forum for network members working in the particular areas. Each TCU organised series of coherent and focused workshops, among others. Parts of their results are reflected in this road map document, the chapters of which are edited by the respective TCU chairs, namely