O-Plan on the Internet

Still under construction

When finished, this document will describe:

Background

Although it has not been well-publicized, it has been possible to run an O-Plan agent remotely on the Internet since at least version 1.2. Indeed, the O-Plan planning and execution agents have always communicated in this way. In version 1.2, the link used Internet-domain sockets; version 2.0 introduced a simpler mechanism based on rsh.

[Three-agent architecture.]

However, certain limitations have only gradually been removed. The 1.2 execution agent could be used remotely, but not the planner, because the built-in task-assigner occupied the communication channels. This limitation was removed in version 2.0. In addition, all of the agents needed to display windows and interact with a user. It wasn't possible to run O-Plan invisibly in the background, and some things a program might want to access or control were available only via the windows. These problems are being addressed in the current development version.

Web demos

If you are familiar with HTML FORMs and the Web's Common Gateway Interface, you may be able to guess how some parts of the demos work.
Jeff Dalton