Since the end of the 1990s, there has been an increasing interest in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) planning techniques to solve real-life problems. In addition to characteristics of academic problems, such as the need to reason about actions, real-life problems require detailed knowledge elicitation, engineering, and management. A systematic design process in which Knowledge and Requirements Engineering tools play a fundamental role is necessary in such applications. One of the main challenges in such design process, and consequently in the study of Knowledge Engineering in AI planning, has been the analysis of requirements and their subsequent transformation into an input-ready model for planners. itSIMPLE is a research project dedicated to the study of a project process to support the design phases of real-life planning models. In this paper, we give an overview of itSIMPLE focusing on the main translation processes among a minimal set of representations: from requirements represented in Unified Modeling Language (UML) to Petri Nets and from UML models to planning domain definition language for problem solving.

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From classic process-and product-oriented production lines, several alternative production arrangements have been tried and modeled. Exploring new features such as non-linearity, integration, supply-chaining and flexibility, more recently focus has been on distributed and collaborative holonic and multi-agent approaches. This production evolution reflects the evolution in manufacturing design and the integration of manufacturing with the ubiquitous culture introduced by e-Work, communication and information systems. More recently, there is another influential vector, typically not considered in the technological analysis of manufacturing advances: the tendency to move from the traditional process-and product-oriented approaches to service-oriented approaches. Such tendency is being spread in research labs and increasingly, in current management decisions, especially in computer and cyber industries. In this article, we analyze closely the coalition between e-Work and service-oriented approach towards a new manufacturing architecture composed by a grid of services which operates in parallel to a main process that defines the manufactured artifact-targeting an interesting blending of product and service. The need to explore and provide different design approaches for this emerging product-service architecture (PSA) is discussed as a future challenge, which demands multidisciplinary tools for analysis and planning.

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It is a well known fact that the AI planning community is very committed to apply the developments already achieved in this area to real complex applications. However realistic planning problems bring great challenges not only for the designers during design processes but also for the automated planners during the planning process itself. In addition, it is quite common to face issues about whether the available planners will be up to solve the problem being modeled during the initial design stages. In this paper we present the experience, results and issues that emerged from testing the performance of the recent planners when solving a real and complex problem such as the planning of daily activities of a petroleum plant for docking, storing and distributing oil. Due to the complexity of this real planning problem, the KE tool itSIMPLE was used in order to support all the design processes such as specification, modeling and domain model analysis that resulted in a PDDL model, automatically generated by the tool, which was used as input for planners. In addition, we present the main modeling process performed for the domain model construction.