Applications of SHOP and SHOP2

The use of Simple Hierarchical Ordered Planner (SHOP) and SHOP2 to investigate research issues in automated planning is discussed. SHOP and SHOP2 use a search-control strategy called ordered task decomposition, which breaks tasks into subtasks and generates the plan's actions in the same order that the plan executor will execute them. SHOP and SHOP2 can do complex inferential reasoning and mixed symbolic/numeric computations. SHOP2's reasoning capabilities let it generate much smaller search spaces than those of most of the other systems.