Austin Tate's Planning Systems

Traverser (also called Graph Traverser 4 - GT4) was created during 1971-1972 in an undergraduate student project in Computer Studies at the University of Lancaster. It built on the work of Donald Michie and his colleagues at the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at the University of Edinburgh.

Interplan was created in 1972-1975 as part of Austin Tate's PhD, supervised by Professor Donald Michie at the Machine Intelligence Research Unit at the University of Edinburgh.

Nonlin was created in 1975-1976 during the first year of the UK Science Research Council project entitled "Planning: a joint AI/OP Approach" whose Principal Investigator was Professor Bernard Meltzer. Lesley Daniel was the OR researcher on the project. Nonlin continued to be developed in the 1982-3 period in join work with Steve Vere at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (who created the DEVISER planner), and with Andrew Whiter at Systems Designers Ltd in the UK. Brian Drabble;s Excalibur planner built on Nonlin by adding a qualitative process reasoner.

O-Plan drew on the Nonlin work and was developed over the period 1983-1999. More details of O-Plan and publications about its technology and applications are available here.

I-X/I-Plan is the most recent planner with work starting in 2000 and continuing to date. More details of I-X/I-Plan and publications about its technology and applications are available here.

Traverser Documents

 Tate, A., (1972) Report: "The development and use of a heuristic problem solver" for project as part of B.A. in Computer Studies at the University of Lancaster, March 1972. [ PDF Format ]

Interplan Documents

 Tate, A. (1973) Handout for talk on new planner, to School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh, 20-Nov-1972. [ PDF Format ]

Tate, A., (1974) "Interacting goals in problem solving" AISB Newsletter, 18, pp. 31-38, November 1974. [ PDF Format ]

Tate, A., (1975) "INTERPLAN: a plan generation system which can deal with interactions between goals" Research Memorandum MIP-R-109, Edinburgh: Machine Intelligence Research Unit, December 1974. [ PDF Format ]

Tate, A., (1975) "Interacting Goals and their Use", Proceedings of the Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-75) pp. 215-218, Tbilisi, USSR, September 1975. [ PDF Format ]

Tate, A., (1976) "Using Goal Structure to direct search in a problem solver" Ph.D. Thesis, University of Edinburgh, September l975. [ PDF Format ]

Nonlin Documents

 Tate, A., (1975) "Generating Project Networks", Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-77) pp. 888-893, Boston, Mass. USA, August 1977. Reprinted in "Readings in Planning", Morgan-Kaufmann, 1990. [ PDF Format ]

Daniel, L. and Tate, A., (1976) "An overview of the project: Planning: a joint AI/OR approach", Unpublished, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh. [ PDF Format ]

Tate, A., (1976) "Project planning using a hierarchic non-linear planner" Research Report No. 25, Edinburgh: Department of Artificial Intelligence, August 1976. [ PDF Format ]

Tate, A. and Daniel, L. (1982) "A Retrospective on the Planning: a joint AI/OR Approach Project". Department of Artificial Intelligence Working Paper 125, Edinburgh. October, 1982. [ PDF Format ]

Tate, A., (1983) "The Less Obvious Side of Nonlin", Unpublished, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh. [ PDF Format ]