Early work on the NONLIN and O-Plan projects indicated a need for a defined methodology which would guide users performing various roles in the acquisition and analysis of domain requirements for planning. This work included links to a requirement analysis methodology, CORE (COntrolled Requirements Expression) , tool support via an intelligent assistant as part of the Task Formalism (TF) Workstation and an initial collection of guidelines and checklists to aid in using the TF domain description language. This paper describes work underway to follow-on from this past research and to infuse it with knowledge gained from recent research related to planning domain development, knowledge modelling, design rationale and ontological and requirements engineering. Introduction The activities involved in discovering, engineering, documenting, and maintaining a set of domain constructs for most AI planning-based projects can be considered ad hoc and disorganised, at best. The current sources for...

The user interface to the O-Plan planning system seeks to differentiate the various roles played by users in systems which support command, planning and control functions. Appropriate support is offered to the Task Assigner, the planning specialist and the operational execution staff. The planning role is supported by a user interface that provides different views of the plan structure. These can be technical or plan structure oriented views, or they may be more visualisation or world oriented views. We provide support to either view via an interface that supports the "plugging-in" of appropriate PlanWorld viewers which conform to a specified interface. 1 O-Plan -- a Modular, Open Planning Architecture The O-Plan Project at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute of the University of Edinburgh is exploring a practical computer based environment to provide for specification, generation, interaction with, and execution of activity plans. O-Plan is intended to be a domain-ind...

Process engineering involves a search for new models of organising work. This synthesis task can become quite difficult and time-consuming as the amount of detail required and interactions between activities increases. Domain independent AI planning offers some promising techniques and representations to assist in this effort. One of the major impediments to transferring this technology to applied, real-world settings is the difficulty encountered in building the domain model which is used in the automated generation of these plans. Competence, as well as good tools, is necessary to carry out this task. A plan domain methodology should be available which provides structured organisational development activities. Users need to know what tasks they have to perform: for each step, information must be available about what input will be needed, and what output will be required, what is to be done and how it can be done well. This paper presents the Common Process Methodology (CPM) which aim...