Generating project networks

Austin Tate Department of Artificial Intelligence University of Edinburgh Edinburgh Scotland Abstract Procedures for optimization and resource allocation in Operations Research first require a project network for the task to be specified. The specification of a project network is at present done in an intuitive way. AI work in plan formation has developed formalisms for specifying primitive activities, and recent work by Sacerdoti (1975a) has developed a planner able to generate a plan as a partially ordered network of actions. The "planning: a joint AI/OR approach" project at Edinburgh has extended such work and provided a hierarchic planner which can aid in the generation of project networks. This paper describes the planner (NONLIN) and the Task Formalism (TF) used to hierarchically specify a domain. Current work in Operations Research (OR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has concentrated on different aspects of the problem. We have taken an interdisciplinary approach in the hope that this will lead to a development of both these aspects. In the OR approach, the planning process falls into two stages. The constituent "jobs" of a plan are specified together with their precedence relationships (i.e.