Austin Tate's Nonlin planning system
------------------------------------
The influential Nonlin hierarchical partial order planning system,
developed by Austin Tate (http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/) in the
University of Edinburgh is available in a browsable and
downloadable form here (this web site):
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/nonlin
For more information and background please see this web site:
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/nonlin/
Austin Tate's Nonlin Planning System
NOTE ADDED: 30 Jan 2014
The nonlin package is demonstrated in the Coursera online course on
Artificial Intelligence Planning
https://www.coursera.org/course/aiplan
Presented by
Gerhard Wickler, The University of Edinburgh
https://www.coursera.org/instructor/gwickler
and
Austin Tate, The University of Edinburgh
https://www.coursera.org/instructor/austintate
Students registered on that course, or anyone else, wanting to run
the nonlin planner can either install linux poplog, as recommended here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/latest-poplog
or install windows poplog, as recommended here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/winpop
(The information here may be out of date, as I am not a windows
user!)
There is a mailing list that can be used to ask for help on poplog or pop11
https://mailman.cs.bham.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/pop-forum
and another for anyone interested in poplog development or ports:
https://mailman.cs.bham.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/poplog-dev
PLEASE DO NOT USE EITHER MAILING LIST FOR ADVERTISEMENTS OR ANNOUNCEMENTS
NOT RELATED TO POPLOG/POP11/PROLOG/LISP/ML
Running Nonlin
Austin put a lot of effort into making nonlin run as it used to in a much
earlier version of Poplog, so that it works in both Windows poplog and
Linux/Unix poplog.
He has produced a video demo of the nonlin planner in use, which you should
be able to copy if you have installed either windows poplog or linux poplog.
The video is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF3s_Nb_FyE
Demonstrations of the University of Edinburgh Nonlin AI Planner
using Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) and Partial-Order Planning (POP)
methods.
More details at http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/nonlin/
TO RUN NONLIN
After installing poplog, fetch the file
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/nonlin/nonlin-2002-11-28.zip
unzip it. E.g. if you unzip it in the $poplocal/local/ directory
it will create a directory
$poplocal/local/nonlin/
containing instructions, a nonlin sub-directory with code and examples,
and a load_nonlin.p file, used to start nonlin interactively in pop11.
Note that at present the package works only with a normal terminal
interface: it has not been converted to be run from inside Ved or XVed,
so there is no point trying to compile it in Ved.
(If anyone alters it to work with Ved so that a task can be specified
in a Ved buffer and Nonlin run from Ved, please submit your changes
to the Poplog repository via Aaron Sloman.)
FURTHER INFORMATION
Instructions and historical information regarding Nonlin, including a
review of the package, are in the file:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/nonlin/readme.txt
A version formatted for Windows users is here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/nonlin/readme-win.txt
Further information, including sample problem domain definitions using
the Nonlin task formalism (TF) can be found in these directories:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/nonlin/nonlin/
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/nonlin/nonlin/tf/
Nonlin is also available in Edinburgh here:
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/nonlin/
The original 1976 technical report defining Nonlin has been scanned in
and is now available as a PDF file (6.75Mbytes) at both the Edinburgh
and Birmingham sites.
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/nonlin/1976-tate-nonlin-dai-memo-25.pdf
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/nonlin/1976-tate-nonlin-dai-memo-25.pdf
Tate, A. (1976) "Project Planning Using a Hierarchic Non-linear
Planner", D.A.I. Research Report No. 25, August 1976, Department of
Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh.
Further information can be found by giving "nonlin+planner" to
google, or other search engines.
Conditions of use
Nonlin is released as is for academic and research purposes. It is a
research prototype created in the mid 1970s and released to people
interested in experimenting with an early AI planner.
Nonlin is subject to the same copyright notice as the Poplog copyright
notice:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/copyright.html
I.e. you can use, copy, alter these files, and re-distribute them, but
you do so at your own risk. Neither the author nor the University
of Birmingham, which hosts the Free Poplog web site
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html
is responsible in any way. Both make no warranties of any sort.
Maintained by
Aaron Sloman
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/
25 Oct 2004
Updated: 30 Jan 2014
(With thanks to Austin Tate.)