ADVISER - A KNOWLEDGE-BASED PLANNING SYSTEM

This work investigates the ability of a planning system called Advisor to satisfy the requirements posed by complex application domains. Thi s paper concentrates on a complex domain that concerns the planning of cargo handling operations for chemical carriers, and identifies the k ey issues of this domain in correspondence to the requirements of comp lex domains. Advanced expressiveness, representation and handling of t emporal information in a symbolic and quantitative way, user interacti on and utilization of appropriate knowledge structures for increasing efficiency, are among the issues under consideration. Advisor has been constructed in a three level modular architecture, enabling users to interact directly with each level. The main module is the TRL-Planner which is supported by the Symbolic Constraint Solver (SCS) and the Tem poral Reference Language interpreter (TRLi).