Plan authoring with continuous effects

Despite significant success in developing more efficient automated planning algorithms there is a need to widen the scope of the technology to bring it to a wider user community. In this paper we bring together two strands of research both attempting to address the problem of widening the take up of planning technologies. The first strand of research tries to widen the scope by increasing the expressiveness of the representation languages. The second tries to address the problem by enriching and structuring domain modelling languages to support knowledge engineering and to provide rich tool sets to support the creation of domain models. This paper describes ongoing work in developing PDDL+ to more adequately model planning domains where the duration of actions plays a significant role in the planning problem. We have constructed a prototype plan authoring tool to allow the exploration of domains captured in the underlying PDDL+ model of durative actions. The plan authoring tools has been integrated into our GIPO environment [5] and forms both a plan visualisation tool and a plan construction tool.