Planning services for individuals: a new challenge for the planning community

This paper describes preliminary work on an innovative
application, intelligent mobile electronic assistants (IMEA), based, on its core, on AI planning/scheduling technology and task ontologies for planning. IMEA aims at assisting people to organize and groups of people to coordinate their everyday tasks. Its target group consists of people that have very tight personal daily plans with a variety of activities (e.g. managers, academics, etc) and have difficulties in remembing and organizing them. Its main objectives are to save user’s resources (time, money) and achieve better utilization of common resources. However, its side-effects could be to popularize artificial intelligence planning and knowledge engineering technology, thus increasing commercial and governmental interest on them. IMEA is based on a distributed open platform with a variety of devices (mainly wireless ones) for its user interface needs, running over the internet. Apart from AI planning and knowledge engineering, IMEA is based on technologies such as semantic web and intelligent agents