A library of system-derived problem-solving methods for planning

Constructing a planner for a particular application is a difficult job, for which little contrite support is currently available. The literature on planning is overwhelming and there exists no clear synthesis of the various planning methods which could be used by knowledge engineers. The contribution of this paper concerns an approach to provide concrete support for engineering planning systems. We use modern knowledge modeling approaches to analyse planning systems described in the literature. The analysis yields a detailed description of these planning systems in terms of the domain knowledge they use and the problem-solving methods they comprise. We show how the result of the analysis can be considered as a library of system-derived problem-solving methods for planning. This library consists of planning problem-solving methods along with their assumptions, which describe the applicability conditions on the domain knowledge of the methods. We describe how the library supports knowledge engineers in building planning systems and present two implemented tools based on the approach. (C) 1998 Academic Press Limited.