Towards an intelligent planning system

Project management is a highly skilled task which is vital for business success, but current tools provide limited support for this critical management function. The paper outlines a proposal for engineering a new tool, based on knowledge-based-system techniques, which will extend the scope of PM support. The proposed tool would be built with conventional planning systems to harness the useful facilities of such tools, and to avoid the reentering of existing plans from scratch. For a company, the benfits of such a tool would be significant. It would provide better support for PM by replicating the expertise of good project managers, enforcing company standards, and reducing the managers’ workloads. For a practising manager, the benfits would include an intelligent system which was easy to use, assisted with the drawing up of plans, could analyse the critique plans, and provide advice on replanning.