Planning in a Complex Real Domain

Dimensions of complexitiy raised during the definition of a system aimed at supporting the planning of initial attack to forest fires are presented and discussed. The complexity deriving from the highly dynamic and unpredictable domain of forest fire, the one related to the individuation and integration of planning techniques suitable to this domain, the complexity of addressing the problem of taking into account the role of the user to be supported by the system and finally the complexity of an architecture able to integrate different subsystems. In particular we focus on the severe constraints to the definition of a planning approach posed by the fire fighting domain, constraints which cannot be satisfied completely by any of the current planning paradigms. We propose an approach based on the integration of skeletal planning and case based reasoning techniques with constraint reasoning. More specifically temporal constraints are used in two steps of the planning process: plan fitting and adaptation, and resource scheduling. Work on the development of the system software architecture with a OOD methodology is in progress