Applications of O-Plan

O-Plan is aimed at being relevant to the following types of problems:

• project management for product introduction, systems engineering, construction, process flow for assembly, integration and verification, etc.

• planning and control of supply and distribution logistics.

• mission sequencing and control of space probes such as Voyager and ERS-1.

These applications 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, the problems of this type represent an important class of industrial relevance.

The areas in which O-Plan has already been applied are as follows:

• Space Platform Construction

• Satellite Planning and Control

• House Building

• Software Development

• Logistics

• Non-Combatant Evacuation Operations

• Other Demonstrations

The space platform construction and the non-combatant evacuation tasks were used as demonstrations of the PlanWorld Viewer Interface of O-Plan. An instance of this interface was constructed using the AutoCAD graphics package.

The current developments of O-Plan are designed to allow it to tackle a number of military relevant logistics problems of interest to the United States. The scenario to be investigated is that of evacuating a number of civilian personal from a conflict area by means of ground, sea and air transport. In order to make the validation and testing of alternative courses of action easier for such scenarios, AIAI (in conjunction with other ARPI groups) has developed the PRECiS environment on behalf of the ARPA-Rome Laboratory Planning Initiative. This involves a fictitious island in the Pacific referred to as Pacifica.

The Pacifica scenario (developed by a Ph.D student, Glen A. Reece on an associated AASERT award) will be used to investigate military logistics problems and to validate the usefulness of generative planning to the military logistics scenario.

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