Workshop on Automated Planning and Scheduling
in New Methods of Electronic, Mobile and
Collaborative Work

DRAFT REPORT  by Lee McCluskey 

The Workshop on Automated P&S in New Methods of E/M/C work
was organised with the primary goal of
exploring the new emphasis in PLANET 2 of P&S as a
technology ripe for exploitation in the modern workplace.
Despite being organised rather quickly the workshop contained eight talks,
with written contributions from six speakers available in the Workshop
Proceedings or online at the Workshop Website. Alfredo Milani,
the workshop's co-chair, introduced
the day's proceedings to over 30 delegates, outlining the day's
schedule and stressing that the workshop concerned topics other than
the world wide web.

Jose Luis Ambite of ISI, California, gave an invited talk entitled
"Heracles: Building Planning and Information Assistants".
He pointed out that
the web is full of disparate information in many formats, and the
work of his research group was aimed at the automated assembly of
information from various sources to satisfy structured information
needs. He gave an online demonstration of a Travel Assistant that
exemplified the approach. This was a tool which brought together
information such as airfares, parking fares,
timetables, weather conditions etc obtained using the web. Its function was
to schedule travel for an individual given meeting times and places.
It performed scheduling using hierarchical networks of constraints
where constraints were propagated as their values became available.
An interesting part of the work was the automated induction of "wrappers"
for web sites: the user clicked on examples of interest on a page
(e.g. the temperature in degrees) and the tool could create a parser
for that page which could help translate it into XML.
This formed the wrapper for the web site that could identify and extract
pieces of information when required by the travel assistant.

Florian Kandler of the Ecommerce Competence Centre, Vienna,
gave a talk entitled "Scheduling in a Virtual Enterprise
in the Service Sector". He was investigating
holiday-package virtual enterprises which had to reconcile the
demands from a set of customers with the potential resources drawn from
a set of service providers. He described an algorithm which
interfaced with service providers' schedules to arrive at
a holiday schedule which satisfied the needs of a customer.

Angelo Oddi of the Italian National Research Centre described a
new tool called MEXAR which supports a mixed-initiative approach
to planning and scheduling. The application is to solve the "Mars-Express
Memory Dumping Problem", a space application involving the
building of a schedule to send stored data from a spacecraft
down to Earth.  During mission planning for spacecraft, the
requested payload operations must be translated into a detailed
mission plan.  MEXAR supports the mission planner in generating the
detailed plan.
Maria Dolores Moreno of the University of Alcala, Spain,
gave a talk which concerned the use of planning
technology in Business Process Re-engineering.
In particular she discussed the automated generation of
process models for business.  New methods of electronic business
have forced organisations to restructure their business processes.
They may need to generate new process models quickly in the
climate of continuous adaptation to market needs. Maria described
a system in which users create a model of the business domain in
a high level language that is transformed into the usual input
for an AI planner (currently CMU's PRODIGY). The planner is then
used to generate a plan (corresponding to a sequence of
activities or task dependencies in a process model)
which is fed back to the user in terms s/he can understand.

Steven Smith of Carnegie-Mellon University, USA, started his
talk by pointing out that the web amounts to an unprecedented
infrastructure for the use of collaborative planning and
scheduling. He described the COMIREM system (Continuous
Mixed-Initiative Resource Management) which provides the
basic set of resource management functions to underpin
a web-based planning and scheduling tool. In particular,
the system is aimed at being used in dynamic and resource
constrained domains. Steve gave a live demonstration
of a Special Forces Operations application showing
how a schedule would dynamically update when constraints
such as resources were changed.

Richard Benjamins of Intelligent Software Components,
Madrid, gave an invited talk on opportunities
for AI software in the world of E-commerce.
He discussed intelligent web applications, and how they
might overcome the shortfall of current applications.
Examples were online banking agents and shopping agents,
where the problem was one of extracting meaningful
information from heterogeneous web sites and
reasoning with it to solve (commercial) goals.
Intelligent search engines, in particular,
that could search the dynamic web as well as the
static web would need to be developed.

The `Panel Discussion' was introduced by two short talks:
Bob Laithwaite of APSolve described his experience on
one of the largest applications of scheduling to date: BT's
Workforce Management System. As the workforce received their
schedules using electronic mobile appliances, this new
application seemed to capture the essence of the workshop.
Next Alfredo Milani summed up with a talk encompassing the
whole scope of the workshop's area. He described the
opportunities for P&S within core web technologies, as well
as how intelligent web-based activities might use
P&S, and how the onset of the Semantic Web gave new opportunities
for utilising P&S technology.  Alfredo stressed that
what we were about was much more than just web-oriented
work, and he described opportunities for collaborative and
mobile P&S technologies in new methods of work. Finally,
the speakers  and the delegates in general were asked for
their opinions on the most desirable new developments in
this area. Three conclusions follow, with the first being the
most important:
a) The development of a common semantics for web sites, possibly
through the use of XML;
b) Being able to assemble and configure existing primitive
services on the web for use in P&S;
c) The further development of techniques in distributed,
collaborative P&S.