O-Plan Web demonstrations

Demonstrations | Instructions | Documents

Welcome to the O-Plan web demonstration page. By following links from this page, you can run O-Plan remotely over the Internet and have it produce plans for tasks (problems) in a number of different domains. The resulting plans and other results then become available via further links. In some cases the demonstrations allow you (and perhaps others concurrently) to interact in a mixed-initiative fashion with the system during plan development, and may support a simulation of plan execution and plan repair.

We hope that you will help us to improve this demonstration facility by telling us of any problems and suggesting anything you'd like to see added or done differently. You will therefore be offered a number of opportunities to mail a comment.

The Demonstrations

There are three basic kinds: COA evaluation matrix interfaces, forms that let you specify tasks by filling in parameters, and lists of predefined tasks from which you select.

COA Evaluation Matrices

Pacifica Disaster Relief
Lets you construct several options to offer disaster relief on Pacifica. This is a simpler version of the more interactive demonstration below and does not require a password.
Pacifica Non-combatant Evacuation Operations (NEO)
Planning for the evacuation of non-combatants from the Island of Pacifica. Lets one or two users - in the roles of task-assigner and/or planning expert - interact with the O-Plan planning agent running as an HTTP server. Several alternative Courses of Action (COAs) can be developed against a number of evaluation criteria. The demonstration shows support for the coordination of the planning process between several agents and users. A password is required (available on request from <oplan@ed.ac.uk>), but further information on the demonstration is available without it.
US Army Small Unit Operations Military Operations in Urban Terrain (SUO MOUT)
A demonstration of the development, execution and repair of plans for US Army Small Unit Operations Military Operations in Urban Terrain. A password is required (available on request from <oplan@ed.ac.uk>), but further information on the demonstration is available without it.
Generic COA Evaluation Matrix
This is a similar demonstration to that provided to support up to two users in NEO planning. However, it is designed to work on any of a range of domains. The generality of this version requires that it use somewhat simpler interfaces than the more tailored NEO interfaces. For instance, tasks are specified by selecting from predefined task schemas. A password is required (available on request from <oplan@ed.ac.uk>).

Task-defining Forms

Unix Volume Groups
Writes a Unix shell script for removing a disk volume group.
Pacifica Island Rescue - Non-combatant Evacuation Operations (NEO)
A Pacifica evacuation planning task with parameters for city populations, the number of ground transports (GTs) available, ground transport capacity, the destination, and a time limit.
US Army Small Unit Operations (SUO) Demonstrations
Examples of US Army Small Unit Operations planning.
O-Plan TF Syntax-checker
Allows you to specify an arbitrary Task Formalism (TF) file by giving an HTTP URL.

Predefined Tasks

A good place to begin is the hypertext version of the O-Plan Demonstration Guide. It describes a number of problem domains -- block-stacking, house-building, space platform construction, Pacifica, etc. -- and contains links that let you apply O-Plan to tasks in those domains.
The Hypertext O-Plan Demonstration Guide
Domain descriptions together with links that run O-Plan, as described above.
Standard O-Plan Task Formalism (TF) Demonstrations
A similar set of domains and tasks, as a plain itemized list. Contains most of the example domains distributed with O-Plan.
Small Unit Operations (SUO) Demonstrations
Examples of US Army Small Unit Operations planning.
Air Campaign Planning - Workflow Planning Aid Demonstration
Workflow planning demonstrations.
Resource Demonstrations
Pacifica evacuation tasks with resource modelling.

Some things you should know before running a demonstration

The primary aim of the demonstrations is to show (and test) various ways of using O-Plan on the Web. You can't always use them to judge O-Plan's abilities as a planner.

Certain demonstrations assume that you're familiar with O-Plan and with the various demonstration domains that are part of the O-Plan distribution. However, some on-line documentation is available (see below).

Each demo provides some way to run O-Plan; this instance of O-Plan will run on a server machine in Edinburgh. Since O-Plan can place a fairly heavy load on that machine, a number of time limits (both real and CPU time) are in force. It's therefore possible that a demo will fail because it exceeds one of these limits. For some of the limits, you'll see a message saying that the limit was exceeded; in other cases, you'll see a blank or truncated result. If either of these things happen, please mail a comment saying which demo you ran and what message, if any, you received.

Almost all of the demos take only a short time to run (a small number of seconds). However, there may be delays on the net, or perhaps something on the server in Edinburgh, that causes a significantly longer time to pass. The output of most demos will include a report that indicates how much time was spent actually producing the plan.

The use the demos effectively, you will need a Web browser that can handle HTML forms and is able to display PostScript files (probably via an external viewer).

Finally, please note that some pages are still under construction and so are incomplete in various ways.

Associated Documents


AIAI Page maintained by oplan@ed.ac.uk, Last updated: Thu Jan 27 13:03:58 2000