This document describes Version 1.0 of the Process Specification Language (PSL). PSL is an interchange format designed to help exchange process information automatically among a wide variety of manufacturing applications such as process modeling, process planning, scheduling, simulation, workflow, project management, and business process re-engineering tools. These tools would interoperate by translating between their native format and PSL. Then, any system would be able to automatically exchange process information with any other system via PSL. This document focuses specifically on PSL's rationale, semantic architecture, informal documentation, and the vision of how one would translate in and out of PSL. 2

this paper, we adopt Newell's perspective [51] of a "knowledge level"' analysis rather than addressing this topic at the "symbol level". Practical plan management requires a "knowledge rich" model [69] that facilitates efficient reasoning given the demands of the surrounding environment. According to our medical interest, approaches dealing with time handling, context, and incomplete information about the world's states and the effects of actions (dynamically changing environments) are most important.

Representing activities and the constraints on their occurrences is an integral aspect of commonsense reasoning, particularly in manufacturing, enterprise modelling, and autonomous agents or robots. In addition to the traditional concerns of knowledge representation and reasoning, the need to integrate software applications in these areas has become increasingly important. However, interoperability is hindered because the applications use different terminology and representations of the domain. These problems arise most acutely for systems that must manage the heterogeneity inherent in various domains and integrate models of different domains into coherent frameworks. For example, such integration occurs in business process reengineering, where enterprise models integrate processes, organizations, goals and customers. Even when applications use the same terminology, they often associate different semantics with the terms. This clash over the meaning of the terms prevents the seamless exchange of information among the applications. Typically, pointto-point translation programs are written to enable communication from one specific application to another. However, as the number of applications has increased and the information has become more complex, it has been more difficult for software developers to provide translators between every pair of applications that must cooperate. What is needed is some way of explicitly specifying the terminology of the applications in an unambiguous fashion. The Process Specification Language (PSL) ([13], [8]) has been designed to facilitate correct and complete exchange of process information among manufacturing systems 1. Included in these applications are scheduling, process modeling, process planning, production planning, simulation, project management, workflow, and business process reengineering. This chapter will give an 1 PSL has been accepted as project ISO 18629 within the International Organisation

Introduction What is a Supply Chain? Utilising Process Tools Interlingua, Modelling, Simulation Scenario Description Scenario Element Descriptions Process Overview Supply Chain Objects People, Companies and Departments Role-Defined Relationships Dates and Times Business Objects General Objects Detailed Scenario Processes Replenish Inventory (Retailer) Scenario Text Analysis Process Handbook PIF Representation IDEF3 Representation Take Delivery (Retailer) Scenario Text Analysis Process Handbook PIF Representation IDEF3 Representation PIF Semantics Summary References About this document ... Abstract The goal of the PIF Project is to develop an interchange format to help automatically exchange process descriptions among a wide variety of business process modelling and support systems such as workflow software, flow charting tools, process simulation systems, and process repositories. As an example of such an exchange, a demonstration scenario has been created which describes the use o...

engineering process in the building of applied AI planning systems. GIPO embodies an object centred approach to planning domain modelling. There are two reasons for providing knowledge engineering support for AI planning: (i) to apply a planning system to a new domain to test the planning system itself (ii) to tackle the end-user problem for the engineer who might be a domain expert but need not necessarily have a specialist knowledge of AI planning. Our research is primarily aimed at developing a method and tools to meet the requirements of the latter case (ii), although the benefits can also be enjoyed by planning experts. 1.

Practical planning systems for real-world environments imply a striking challenge, because the planning and visualization techniques available are not that straightforwardly applicable. Skeletal plans are an effective way to reuse existing domain-specific procedural knowledge, but leave room for execution-time exibility. However, the basic concepts of skeletal plans are not sufficient in our medical domain. First, the temporal dimensions and variability of plans have to be modelled explicitly. Second, the compositions and the interdependencies of different plans are not lucid to medical domain experts. The aim of our paper is to overcome these limitations and to present an intuitive user interface to the plan-representation language Asbru. We explored different representations and developed a powerful plan visualization, called AsbruView. AsbruView consists of two views, first, a topological view, which utilizes the metaphor graphics of "running tracks" and "traffic" and, second, ...

The world of business and organised work is changing. This change is driven by a shift of organisational focus away from individual fragmented tasks toward an examination of the holistic processes. New tools are being developed to assist individuals in building, evaluating, and managing these processes. The application of these tools though must be holistic as well. Organisational knowledge management should be structured in a way that encourages exchange of process knowledge. In order to e ectively share information, we believe theremust be an explicit account ofwhat knowledge will be exchanged, a shared understanding. We approach thisbyproviding an extensible ontology which presents process related concepts and terminology which are common to a range of applications and industries.

In order to support a wide range of planning-related activities, we argue that plan and action representations must move to a more expressive language for goals and capabilities than is found in most current systems. A structured representation for capabilities can make explicit a hierarchy of capabilities based on subsumption, resulting in benefits for reasoning, representing, and acquiring operators and plans. By making capabilities more easily understandable to humans, such a representation can also benefit mixed-initiative approaches. We present a structured representation of capabilities and a subsumption-based matcher for it. We then describe three existing systems that use this approach in different kinds of planning tasks and tools. We finish with a discussion of how plan generation systems can benefit from using this representation. Introduction An important component of plans, processes, and activities is the description of the capabilities (or goals, or tasks...

An analysis of strategies, recognizable abstract patterns of planned behavior, reveals an enormous divide between the kind of planning that artificial intelligence planning systems do and the kind of strategic planning that people do. This paper describes a project to collect and represent strategies on a large scale to identify the representational requirements of strategic planning in order to inform the design of future artificial intelligence planning systems. Three hundred and seventy-two strategies were collected from ten different planning domains. Each was represented at an abstract level and in a preformal manner designed to reveal the planning concepts that each strategy contains. The contents of these representations, consisting of nearly one thousand unique planning concepts, were then collected and organized into forty-eight groups that outline the representational and functional components of strategic planning systems.

This paper presents results from the implementation of a prototype based on the architecture for integrating planning and simulators proposed last year. The paper describes exactly what has been implemented and uses a non-combatant evacuation scenario (NEO) to show the benefits of such integration. Also discussed are the lessons learned from the results obtained and, finally, a description of a revised and improved architecture, which is believed will address some of the outstanding research issues. 1. Introduction Large planning problems demand the co-operation and collaboration of many disparate and geographically dispersed experts. As part of the planning process, it is desirable to `play out' fragments of the evolving plan, obtain and evaluate feedback, and compare alternative courses of action (COA). One way of achieving this is to use simulators to exercise the plan and provide feedback on the planning process by incorporating measures of effectiveness into plans. However, exis...