Course Description:

One of the core abilities of an intelligent software system is to be
able to solve problems and to plan how to achieve goals.  Search is a
general purpose technique for finding solutions to problems.  However,
these search spaces can be quite large and planning is one technique
for exploiting domain-specific knowledge to reduce the size of the
space to be searched.  A planner can be viewed as a combination of
algorithm, representation, and heuristics.  We will look at these
components and how they interact.

Course Outcomes:

By the end of this course you will have learnt to:

- to understand current research papers on Automated Planning
- to be able to use state-of-the-art planning systems to solve planning problems
- to present problems in PDDL, the standard language for describing planning problems
- to understand some of the tradeoffs involved in representing planning problems 
- to create domain-specific heuristics 
- to understand some of the tradeoffs involved in creating heuristics