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This blog post is intended to provide a quick overview of our work on I-X – “Intelligent Technology” and especially its application to intelligent planning systems using I-Plan and its underlying ontology.

Austin Tate and the Edinburgh Planning Group

Firstly a brief introduction. I am Professor of Knowledge-Based Systems at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the University’s Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI). More information via http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/.

AI planning has been a topic of active research at Edinburgh since the 1960s and I have been exploring this area since the early 1970s. The Planning and Activity Management Group within the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh is exploring representations and reasoning mechanisms for inter-agent activity support. The agents may be people or computer systems working in a coordinated fashion. The group explores and develops generic approaches by engaging in specific applied studies. Applications include crisis action planning, command and control, space systems, manufacturing, logistics, construction, procedural assistance, help desks, emergency response, etc.
Our long term aim is the creation and use of task-centric virtual organisations involving people, government and non-governmental organisations, automated systems, grid and web services working alongside intelligent robotic, vehicle, building and environmental systems to respond to very dynamic events on scales from local to global.

More on our planning technology, research and applications projects is described at http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/plan/

I-X and I-Plan

I-X – http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/ or http://i-x.info – is a systems integration architecture. Its design is based on the earlier O-Plan agent architecture. I-X provides an issue-handling style of architecture, with reasoning and functional capabilities provided as plug-ins. Also via plug-ins it allows for sophisticated constraint management, and a wide range of communications and visualisation capabilities. I-X agents may be combined in various ways, and may interwork with other processing capabilities or architectures especially where hybrid cognitive systems are joined to algorithms and data driven sub-cognitive modules where they can all work in an “intelligible” and human level explainable manner. I-X supports applications orientated towards “synthesis” tasks where such as design, configuration and especially planning. It is especially designed to support mixed initiative work between people, robots and computer systems working in a cooperative fashion.

An introductory paper to the approach is available here…

Tate, A. (2000) Intelligible AI Planning, in Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XVII, Proceedings of ES2000, The Twentieth British Computer Society Special Group on Expert Systems International Conference on Knowledge Based Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence, pp. 3-16, Cambridge, UK, December 2000, Springer.
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/documents/2000/2000-sges-tate-intelligible-planning.pdf

In a nutshell, all aspects of agent capabilities, activities, tasks, objectives, etc are represented in some way as a specialisation of a set of “issues”, a set of “nodes” (think activities in a planning context or parts of a designed object), a set of “constraints” of various kinds and a set of “annotations”. We write this as . I-X, our systems architecture, essentially just uses its computational capabilities to handle issues, apply nodes, manage constraints and interpret annotations.

Ontology – Issues, Nodes, Constraints and Annotations

Here is a quick intro style paper on the idea of treating all aspects of task specification, planning, environment modelling and lower level activity as “constraints on permissible behaviour” and our Ontology for plans, activity, agent capabilities and all things like that (though it actually is more general and applies also to designed artifacts, scheduled things and configuration tasks).

Tate, A. (2003) : a Shared Model for Mixed-initiative Synthesis Tasks, Proceedings of the Workshop on Mixed-Initiative Intelligent Systems (MIIS) at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-03), pp. 125-130, Acapulco, Mexico, August 2003.
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/documents/2003/2003-ijcai-miis-tate-inca.pdf

My work on hierarchical planning over the years led to a very simple abstract ontology suitable for objectives, tasking, activity specification and capability modelling which is intended to be as flexible (and additive) as required for any application. The concepts within the ontology have been a core of standards such as NIST Process Specification Language (later an ISO process specification standard), etc. We call this – it is an ontology suited for any “synthesised” thing… and allows for design, configuration as well as planning applications. which allows for a set of constraints on behaviour where the types of constraint are “issues” to be addressed, “nodes” (which can be thought of in a planning context as “include activity” constraints, “constraints” themselves (in a planning context usually time, and object co-designation/non-co-designation and sometimes spatial), and “annotations” (which we use to capture underlying gIBIS style rationale of how issues/tasks are turned into selected activities under the constraints).

An I-X system can “handle issues”, “apply nodes”, “manage constraints” and “interpret annotations”. The idea is that the components in an inspired systems share and communicate constraints up and down, and that lower levels can communicate via partially shared constraints that can be understood between the levels (this often involves time, object = and /= ) so there can be yes, no and “maybe if” information passed between the levels to help home in on a mutually acceptable plan in a mixed initiative fashion. Great where humans, organisations, robots and environmental systems are all cooperating.

More Publications

The above papers (as PDF) and others that go into more technical details on the I-X/I-Plan system and how it uses can be found by looking for keywords in paper titles for or “Constraint” in the following documents index…
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/documents/
and for our earlier O-Plan planner use of (a forerunner of the more abstract upper level ontology)…
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/oplan/documents/