Putting Knowledge Rich Plan Representations to Use

Austin Tate, AIAI, The University of Edinburgh.

Research into the generation of plans using knowledge based techniques is now maturing and finding practical application in the commercial, industrial and defence sectors. This has led to a rapid expansion in the last couple of years of investment in this area. Ways to represent plans which have emerged from the research have been found to be of benefit in a number of areas -- even when the generation of a plan is not the primary concern. One way in which the research is being exploited is via the use of knowledge rich plan representations to allow systems to improve their monitoring, analysis and advisory capabilities.

These knowledge rich plan representations are now finding use is in the area of Process Modelling -- in particular for business process modelling. Enriched process models can lead to enhancements of the analysis and critiquing of business processes and can open up a variety of ways to support the synthesis and re-engineering of processes, the creation of plans and intelligent workflow management systems.

Knowledge based approaches are acknowledged as a key component in facilitating the integration of "islands of automation'' in today's enterprises. Means to connect executive strategic decision making, analysis and direction with tactical planning and scheduling capabilities and on to effective operations management within an organisation may be facilitated by using AI based plan representation approaches.

The First Conference on Enterprise Integration Modelling identified support for the management of change as an important area for the success of enterprise integration efforts. The working groups of the conference also believed that a combination of Artificial Intelligence ( AI) and Operations Research (OR) methods as explored by the knowledge based planning community could be a good basis for this work.