Automated planning technology now plays a significant role in a variety of demanding applications, ranging from controlling space vehicles and robots to playing the game of bridge. These real-world applications create new opportunities for synergy between theory and practice: observing what works well in practice leads to better theories of planning, and better theories lead to better performance of practical applications.
Automated Planning mirrors this dialogue by offering a comprehensive, up-to-date resource on both the theory and practice of automated planning. The book goes well beyond classical planning, to include temporal planning, resource scheduling, planning under uncertainty, and modern techniques for plan generation, such as task decomposition, propositional satisfiability, constraint satisfaction, and model checking.
The authors combine over 30 years experience in planning research and development to offer an invaluable text to researchers, professionals, and graduate students.
*Comprehensively explains paradigms for automated planning.
*Provides a thorough understanding of theory and planning practice, and how they relate to each other.
*Presents case studies of applications in space, robotics, CAD/CAM, process control, emergency operations, and games.
*Provides a thorough understanding of AI planning theory and practice, and how they relate to each other.
*Covers all the contemporary topics of planning, as well as important practical applications of planning, such as model checking and game playing.
*Presents case studies and applications in planning engineering, space, robotics, CAD/CAM, process control, emergency operations, and games.
*Provides lecture notes, examples of programming assignments, pointers to downloadable planning systems and related information online.

Autonomous AI systems need complex computational techniques for planning and performing actions. Planning and acting require significant deliberation because an intelligent system must coordinate and integrate these activities in order to act effectively in the real world. This book presents a comprehensive paradigm of planning and acting using the most recent and advanced automated-planning techniques. It explains the computational deliberation capabilities that allow an actor, whether physical or virtual, to reason about its actions, choose them, organize them purposefully, and act deliberately to achieve an objective. Useful for students, practitioners, and researchers, this book covers state-of-the-art planning techniques, acting techniques, and their integration which will allow readers to design intelligent systems that are able to act effectively in the real world.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction, held in College Park, MD, USA, March 29-31, 2011. The 48 papers and 3 keynotes presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 88 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics including social network analysis; modeling; machine learning and data mining; social behaviors; public health; cultural aspects; and effects and search.