A shell for cooperative planning

This paper describes Inspire, a shell for easy development of cooperative planning systems that make plans in cooperation with planners. Cooperative planning systems are required to revise plans in ways expected by planners. In Inspire, a problem of deciding methods for revising plans is formulated as a problem of deciding constraint propagation paths. Our policies in developing Inspire were that (1) it should be possible to develop cooperative planning systems on Inspire simply by defining constraints and methods of satisfying them as models, and (2) Inspire should provide a model representation method and a function for revising plans to satisfy defined constraints, and that both should be independent of specific business planning problems. In Inspire, constraints are basically classified into equality constraints and inequality constraints. The former are defined as relations. To satisfy them, a bidirectional update propagation mechanism is provided. It automatically calculates propagation paths and changes variables on the paths. The latter are defined as rules. To satisfy them, a production system is used.