Modeling planning problems

Abstract

A mathematical model of planning is worked out in this paper. The terms ’planning problem‘, ‘plan’, ’solution of a planning problem’ etc. are often used in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Decision Support Systems and Operation Research. The meaning of these terms, however, is rather intuitive. This article presents a general concept of planning that covers a wide range of planning problems. The definitions that capture the necessary notions can be viewed as a framework to specify planning problems with. The formalism applied here directly leads to a high level description language. This provides a basis of the knowledge representation shell of systems that deal with planning problems. Examples given in the appendices demonstrate how to describe different ‘planning type‘ tasks with the language extracted from the theory.