Austin Tate's Nonlin Planning System

The Nonlin hierarchical partial-order AI planning system, developed by Austin Tate at the University of Edinburgh, is available in a browsable and downloadable form here: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/nonlin/ or http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/nonlin thanks to Aaron Sloman at the University of Birmingham for encouraging Austin to make it it run as it used to in a much earlier version of Poplog, so that it works in both Windows Poplog and Linux/Unix Poplog.

Get a copy of the freely distributable version of Poplog at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html [PC/Windows version 15.5 is available locally here].

Fetch the zip file and unzip it in the $poplocal/local/ (or into any directory you will make the current directory) if you wish to try it out.

Documentation

Some information on getting Nonlin up and running in recent versions of Poplog are in the readme.txt. Help to run the program is available in the on-line instructions. Further information, including sample problem domain definitions using the Nonlin task formalism (TF) can be found in the release zip file or can be browsed on-line here.

Reference/Citations

Tate, A. (1976) "Project Planning Using a Hierarchic Non-linear Planner", D.A.I. Research Report No. 25, August 1976, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh. [ PDF Format (6.75MB) ]

A review of this paper on Nonlin by Subbarao Kambhampati in 2002 is available here.

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" (eds. Allen, J., Hendler, J. and Tate, A.), Morgan-Kaufmann, 1990. [ PDF Format (1.5MB) ]

Other documents on Nonlin are available here.

A note by Austin Tate, written on 9-Jan-2008, on choice ordering mechanisms and heuristic search in Nonlin, O-Plan and I-X/I-Plan is available here.

UM Nonlin

The University of Maryland produced a Common Lisp version of some core parts of the Nonlin planner incorporating its hierarchical partial order approach to planning. See http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/plus/Nonlin/ for more details and to download that version.

Excalibur

Brian Drabble's Ph.D project Excalibur planner was based on Nonlin and linked HTN planning methods with qualitative process reasoning. It is available at http://www.cirl.uoregon.edu/drabble/Excalibur/.

Copyright

Nonlin is subject to the "Copyright Notice for Poplog and Associated Files and Packages" available at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/copyright.html [also locally available here].