The Emergence of Standard Planning and Scheduling System Components Open Planning and Scheduling Architectures

As realistic systems are built and commercial toolkits are created for plan ning and scheduling applications it becomes increasingly important that mod ularisation of these standard components is attempted This can lead to re usability embeddability and improved implementation provision One early example of a standardised component is the Truth Criterion condition establishment algorithmwhich is now found at the heart of most activity based planning systems The modularisation of this algorithm has led to an explosion of further development empirical and theoretical study of this component The provision of powerful constraint management languages and tools could lead to a rapid expansion of the bene ts to be gained by identifying more standard components that can be combined and re used in planning and scheduling systems O Plan is a command planning and control architecture which has an open modular structure intended to allow experimentation on or replacement of var ious components This paper describes the modular structure of the system along with the internal and external interface languages and protocols which are being developed on the O Plan project The research is seeking to isolate functionality that may be generally required in a number of applications and across a number of di erent planning scheduling and control systems This paper is intended to further discussions on the identi cation of suitable standard re usable components in planning and scheduling systems