Communicating time-oriented, skeletal plans to domain experts lucidly

Abstract

ractical planning systems for real-world environments imply a striking challenge, because the planning and visualization techniques available are not that straightforwardly applicable. Skeletal plans are an effective way to reuse existing domain-specific procedural knowledge, but leave room for execution-time flexibility. However, the basic concepts of skeletal plans are not sufficient in our medical domain. First, the temporal dimensions and variability of plans have to be modelled explicitly. Second, the compositions and the interdependencies of different plans are not lucid to medical domain experts. The aim of our paper is to overcome these limitations and to present an intuitive user interface to the plan-representation language Asbru. We explored different representations and developed a powerful plan visualization, called AsbruView. AsbruView consists of two views, first, a topological view, which utilizes the metaphor graphics of "running tracks" and "traffic" and, second, a temporal view, which utilizes the idea of LifeLines.