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Achievements
Formation
Yellow Pages Layout
EASE
Hazardous Substance Exposure
GhostWriter
Planning and Document Layout
Expert Provisioner
RAF Logistics support
Fraud Detection
for Finance
EUMETSAT
Satellite metacommand system
Standards
International contributions
O-Plan and I-X
Planning
Optimum-AIV
Ariane IV Payload Planning
The applications of O-Plan fit midway between the large scale manufacturing scheduling problems found in some industries (where there are often few inter-operation constraints) and the complex puzzles dealt with by very flexible logic based tools. However, problems of this type represent an important class of industrial relevance. O-Plan is relevant to the following types of problems:
  • project management for product introduction, systems engineering, construction
  • assembly, integration and verification
  • process flow and workflow planning
  • planning and control of supply and distribution logistics.
  • mission sequencing and control of space probes such as Voyager and ERS-1.
  • crisis response
O-Plan has already been successfully applied in the following areas:
  • Space Platform Construction
  • Satellite Planning and Control
  • Construction and House Building
  • Software Development
  • Unix administrator's script writing
  • Logistics
  • Non-Combatant Evacuation Operations
  • Crisis Response
  • Air Campaign Planning Workflow
  • Other Demonstrations
I-X is a new systems integration architecture. Based on the O-Plan agent architecture, I-X provides an issue-handling workflow style of architecture, with reasoning and functional capabilities provided as plug-ins.

The I-Technology programme has 5 aspects:
  1. Systems Integration - A broad vision of an open architecture for intelligent systems creation for synthesis tasks (such as planning, design and configuration) based on the handling of "issues" and the management or maintenance of the constraints describing the product of the process.
  2. Representation - a core notion of the representation of a synthesis process and the product(s) of such processes as a set of nodes making up the process or product, along with constraints on the relationship between those nodes, a set of outstanding issues, and annotations related to these - <I-N-C-A> - Issues, Nodes, (Critical and Auxiliary) Constraints and Annotations. Engagement with various standards setting groups is a part of this work.
  3. Reasoning - the provision of reusable reasoning and constraint or model management capabilities.
  4. User Interfaces - to understand user roles in performing collaborative activities and to provide generic modules which present the state of the processes they are engaged in, their relationships to others and the status of the artifacts/products they are working with.
  5. Applications - work in various application sectors which will seek to create generic approaches (I-Tools) for the various types of Task in which users may engage.
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Updated: Tue Jul 15 14:19:58 2003
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