The competitive development and optimization of manufacturing systems challenge the collaboration and innovation of enterprises. Different information, thinking, and points of view have to be exchanged across engineering, decision-making, and executive levels safely and effectively. The Virtual Reality (VR) technologies provide the users advanced Human-Computer-Interfaces for designing, analyzi...

The paper describes a collaborative assistance approach with spatiotemporal planning, which requires user’s active participation in the problem solving task. The proposed collaborative assistance system operates on a region-based representation structure, which allows for partial specification of constraints at different levels of granularity. Weakly specified constraints contribute on the one ...

Mixed-initiative assistants are systems that support humans in their decision-making and problem-solving capabilities in a collaborative manner. Such systems have to integrate various artificial intelligence capabilities, such as knowledge representation, problem solving and planning, learning, discourse and dialog, and human-computer interaction. These systems aim at solving a given problem au...

Building design and planning is a typical instance of coordination and collaboration processes where experts work together in fulfilling their own distinct planning tasks that build the basis for the realization of the joint building project. Increasing requirements on building performance, like sustainability and energy efficiency, and project complexity call for a holistic view of the project...

For complex spatial decision problems a combination of software tools for group decision support, individual decision support and geographic analysis is required. The paper describes a respective approach and the integration of tools that were originally developed independently in two teams of Fraunhofer AIS. The first software system, Zeno, is a Java application for the World Wide Web designed...

We study collaborative resource planning that arises when resource managers must coordinate their planning with internal or external customers. We envision a setting where geographically dispersed decision makers (agents) coordinate their resource planning using asynchronous, web-enabled mechanisms. We propose the design of such a mechanism where resource allocation is communicated in the form ...

Workflow is rapidly becoming a standard technology in the corporate computing environment. Workflow automates an actual business process, and as such must have a representation of that process. This paper questions how one arrives at the process to be represented. Collaborative Planning (CP) is presented as a way to discover and implement process representations regardless of the workflow syste...

Very few research efforts have been spent on the coordination of plans and operations of independent carriers in an intermodal transportation chain. The impact of this lack of collaboration and coordination is shown in an accordant scenario and first ideas are presented to overcome this situation following the principles of decentralized planning.

Planning is vital to a wide range of domains, including robotics, military strategy, logistics, itinerary generation and more, that both humans and computers find difficult. Collaborative planning holds the promise of greatly improving performance on these tasks by leveraging the strengths of both humans and automated planners. However, this requires formalizing the problem domain and input, wh...