A planning system for large-scale industrial projects

Industrial planning involves an in-depth understanding and continual consideration of all phases in the product lifecycle, and the interdependences of subtasks, from conceptual design to implementation and beyond. In some engineering disciplines, for example construction, the problem is compounded by the number and types of disparate disciplines involved in the lifecycle, and in the case of major projects, the final results are all too often characterised by budget deficits and project timescale overruns. The paper describes an approach to industrial planning which relies on a centralised symbolic model of the proposed project in terms of a fusion of three distinct relational models; component, action and resource. The paper describes the philosophy of model based planning and its application in the industrial context