No Planner Is an Island: Lessons from the Nextcut Process Planner

My experience with "practical planning problems" is mainly through the process planning domain. I will describe some of the aspects of this domain that set it apart from the simulated toy-domains, and address their implications for the "typical" AI planning algorithms. The work itself is described in the references [8, 6, 7, 4, 5]. The paper is organized into three parts. In the first part, I describe the process planning domain in general terms and explain its interesting characteristics from AI planning view point. In the second part, I provide a brief overview of the NExT-COT process planning system. In the third part, I attempt to answer the questions raised in the symposium CFP in teams of our process planning work. It is possible to read Parts I and HI to get a high level picture, and then get details from Part H. "