Intelligent Techniques for Planning

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Publisher Marketing: The Intelligent Techniques for Planning presents a number of modern approaches to the area of automated planning. These approaches combine methods from classical planning such as the construction of graphs and the use of domain-independent heuristics with techniques from other areas of artificial intelligence. This book discuses, in detail, a number of state-of-the-art planning systems that utilize constraint satisfaction techniques in order to deal with time and resources, machine learning in order to utilize experience drawn from past runs, methods from knowledge systems for more expressive representation of knowledge and ideas from other areas such as Intelligent Agents. Apart from the thorough analysis and implementation details, each chapter of the book also provides extensive background information about its subject and presents and comments on similar approaches done in the past. Contributor Bio:  Vlahavas, Ioannis Ioannis Vlahavas is a professor at the Department of Informatics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He received his Ph. D. degree in Logic Programming Systems from the same University in 1988. During the first half of 1997 he was a visiting scholar at the Department of CS at Purdue University. He specializes in logic programming, knowledge based and AI systems and he has published over 100 papers, 9 book chapters and co-authored 4 books in these areas. He teaches logic programming, AI, expert systems, and DSS. He has been involved in more than 15 research projects, leading most of them. He was the chairman of the 2nd Hellenic Conference on AI and the local organizer of the 2nd International Summer School on AI Planning. Contributor Bio:  Vrakas, Dimitris Dimitris Vrakas is finishing his PhD in Distributed Planning and Scheduling at the Dept of Informatics of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He has published several articles and presented various papers on important aspects of Automated Planning such as Learning aided Planning Systems. He is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association of Greek Informaticians and the Hellenic Society for Artificial Intelligence.