The project AIPlan4EU aims to bring the most advanced task planning and execution technology to companies, small and medium size enterprises, innovators, practitioners and more through the European AI On-Demand (AI4EU) Platform. Automated Planning and Scheduling is a central research area in AI that has been studied since the inception of the field. Planning is a decision-making technology that consists in reasoning on a predictive model of a system being controlled and deciding how and when to act in order to achieve a desired objective. It is a relevant technology for many application areas that need quick, automated, and optimal decisions, like agile manufacturing, agriculture, or logistics. Although there is a wealth of techniques that are mature in terms of science and systems, several obstacles hinder their adoption, thus preventing them from making the footprint on industry that they should make. For example, it is hard for practitioners to find the right techniques for a given planning problem, there are no shared standards to use them, and there is no easy access to expertise on how to encode domain knowledge into a planner. The AIPlan4EU project will bring AI planning as a first-class citizen in the AI4EU platform by developing a uniform, user-centered framework to access the existing planning technology and by devising concrete guidelines for innovators and practitioners on how to use this technology. To do so, we will consider use-cases from diverse application areas that will drive the design and the development of the framework and include several available planning systems as engines that can be selected to solve practical problems. We will develop a general and planner-agnostic API that will both be served by the AI4EU platform and be available as a resource to be integrated into the users' systems. The framework will be validated on use-cases both from within the consortium and recruited by means of cascade funding; moreover, standard interfaces between the framework and common industrial technologies will be developed and made available. The main role of DFKI in the project is in the development of technology specific bridges (TSB) that will allow the connection between the framework and various use-cases from industry. This process includes converting technology specific data into planning problems as well as to process the results and execute the plans accordingly. More concretely, DFKI will lead the effort behind generating general integration principles behind the above-mentioned TSBs as well as to provide implement one specific TSB for a use-case dealing with campaign planning for agriculture.
Partners
FBK (Fondazione Bruno Kessler) (Italy) LAAS-CNRS (France) Örebro University (Sweden) Basel University (Switzerland) University of Brescia (Italy) "La Sapienza" University (Italy) Airbus SAS (France) Agrotech Valley Forum (Germany) EasyMile (France) F6S (Ireland) Magazino (Germany) Meritor (Sweden) Procter & Gamble Services (Belgium) Saipem (Italy) Trasys International (Belgium)
