Knowledge-based planning systems: a tour

Project planning is a discipline which promotes itself as being well understood, at the heart of good management, and extremely powerful. Despite this, the subject is also an extremely active area for researchers in many disciplines, but for precisely the opposite reasons to those stated above. For researchers in artificial intelligence, autonomous planning is one of the longest-established topics of interest, and certainly one of the most difficult, and so are the underlying principles and practices really so clear? It is taken for granted that every day people must plan, schedule and control the activities which make up their lives. In the light of this, then, it seems surprising that there is no general theory which seeks to explain people's planning, scheduling and control behaviour. In the absence of an underlying theory, can project management claim to have moved beyond its infancy? The paper outlines the well founded design issues to be considered when an autonomous planning system is built. © 1992.