A Visual Programming Tool for Designing Planning Problems for Semantic Web Service Composition

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the issue of knowledge representation for AI Planning problems, especially those related to Semantic Web Service composition. It discusses current approaches in encoding planning problems using the PDDL formal language and it presents ViTAPlan, a user-friendly visual tool for planning. More than just being a user friendly environment for executing the underlying planner, the tool serves as a unified planning environment for encoding a new problem, solving it, visualizing the solution and monitoring its execution on a simulation of the problem’s world. The tool consists of various sub-systems, each one accompanied by a graphical interface, which collaborate with each other and assist the user, either a knowledge engineer, a domain expert, an academic or even an end-user in industry, to carry out complex planning tasks, such as composing complex Semantic Web Services from simple ones, in order to achieve complex tasks.