A Vision for Composing, Integrating, and Deploying AI Planning Functionalities

AI planning deals with automatically selecting and organising actions to achieve some user objective. The field offers planning tools not only to solve planning problems but also to address other planning aspects, such as modeling problems and validating found solutions. Despite the need for a fully-fledged planning functionality in real-world applications, however, no tool exists supporting all aspects. As a result, there is a need to manually combine several planning tools that are heterogeneous in terms of software, design, and configuration requirements. While the manual process of combining, integrating and, finally, deploying these systems is time-consuming and error-prone, it also demands immense planning and technical expertise from the practitioners. In this paper, we introduce a vision for composing, integrating, and deploying AI planning functionalities contemplated given several prerequisites for the design of planning services. The objective is to enable straightforward composition and integration of various modular planning services provided by different tools into advanced AI planning systems by intuitive modelling and automatic deployment. Our vision can lead to new research and development opportunities in both AI planning and system engineering, ultimately contributing to the industrialisation of AI.