Austin Tate | Graph Traverser GT4 | Interplan | Nonlin | O-Plan | I-X/I-Plan | Applications

Austin Tate's Biography

Austin Tate Research, development and use of planning and activity management systems:
Austin Tate's long term aim is the creation and use of task-centric virtual organisations involving people, government and non-governmental organisations, automated systems, grid and web services working alongside intelligent robotic, vehicle, building and environmental systems to respond to very dynamic events on scales from local to global.

See http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/ for more details.


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/OR Approach" whose Principal Investigator was Professor Bernard Meltzer. Lesley Daniel was the Operational Research researcher on the project. Nonlin continued to be developed in the 1982-3 period in joint 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. More details of Nonlin and publications about its technology and applications are available here.

O-Plan drew on the Nonlin work and was developed over the period 1983-1999 by a team of researchers, students and collaborating organisations. It was also the basis of the design of the OPTIMUM-AIV planner used for Ariane rocket payload pay assembly, integration and verification by the European Space Agency. More details of O-Plan and publications about its technology and applications are available here.

I-X/I-Plan work started in 2000 and continues to date, though active work on the planner code concluded in 2012. More details of I-X/I-Plan and publications about its technology and applications are available here.

See also Readings in Planning - Allen, James, Hendler, James and Tate, Austin (editors) (1990) Readings in Planning, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers 1990. [Table of Contents]


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-1973. [ 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., (1975) "Using Goal Structure to direct search in a problem solver" Ph.D. Thesis, University of Edinburgh, September l975. [ PDF Format ]


Nonlin Documents

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., (1977) "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 ]

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. 22-Aug-1983. [ PDF Format ]


O-Plan Documents

All publications related to O-Plan are available at http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/oplan/documents/.

http://www.wordle.net/

I-X/I-Plan Documents

All publications related to I-X/I-Plan are available at http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/documents/.

http://www.wordle.net/

Edinburgh University - Artificial Intelligence - Planning Systems - Applications

A leaflet describing applications of Nonlin and AI Planning work at Edinburgh's Planning Group, published in 1983, is available in PDF Format (2.5MB) and as a JPG Image (4.2MB).

A leaflet describing Edinburgh University AI planning applications work, published in 2006 is available in PDF Format (360KB) and as a JPG Image (1MB).

Austin Tate | Graph Traverser GT4 | Interplan | Nonlin | O-Plan | I-X/I-Plan | Applications