An interactive planning environment for critical operations

In this paper, an interactive critical operations planning environment (COPE) is described for planning critical construction operations involving large semistationary equipment such as cranes, concrete pumps, and manipulators. Careful planning is necessary for the use of semistationary equipment; however, formal planning methods and tools are limited. Planning is typically the responsibility of a small pool of experts whose knowledge is largely undocumented. Automating and formalizing aspects of the planning process can improve the productivity and effectiveness of expert or nonexpert critical operations planners. The proposed planning environment uses computer-aided drafting tools and a set of computerized planning primitives to facilitate a very visual planning process. The planning principles implemented include human-computer interaction, constraint enforcement, and performance measurement. Implementation details and initial research results are presented in this paper, which follows previous work. With the developed planning environment and process, a significant amount of planning time can be saved so that more alternatives can be evaluated. A better plan can be determined through comparison of more alternatives. The structured planning process also allows planners to perform more detailed analyses on planning problems. Better decisions can thus be made based on the analyses.