Early European funding was also important in setting up the group.
Industrial collaboration is also important.
Planning research has reached a stage of maturity that should have resulted in wide industrial and commercial take up. Maintenance is costly and difficult. Knowledge elicitation and domain modelling are necessary processes often considered a 'black art' in most approaches to planning system development. Research at Brighton has, for a number of years, been concerned with issues related to domain modelling and planning approaches able to exploit explicit, knowledge-rich, models in the compilation of plan schemas and plan libraries. Recently, our approach has been to address the complexity problem by adopting a distributed planning strategy that is able to partition the search space along a number of dimensions, including trade or profession 'ownership', activity or goal sets based on geography, time, etc.