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. The problems of model building and maintainability are real and we intend to develop methods of elicitation, validation and verification based on methodologies developed for knowledge-based systems. The creation and 'evolution' of such models has been regarded as added value by our collaborators, and will certainly become part of a wider effort in knowledge management in the future.