Context dependent effects in temporal planning -- Information gathering plans with sensing actions -- What does a planner need to know about execution? -- Planning and chemical plant operating procedure synthesis: A case study -- Task planning and partial order planning: A domain transformation approach -- Expressing transformations of structured reactive plans -- Fast probabilistic plan debugging -- Quantification in generative refinement planning -- Modal tableaux for reasoning about actions and plans -- A time and resource problem for planning architectures -- Planning via model checking: A decision procedure for AR -- Possibilistic planning: Representation and complexity -- Planning with sensing for a mobile robot -- Encoding planning problems in nonmonotonic logic programs -- An argument for a hybrid HTN/operator-based approach to planning -- Natural hierarchical planning using operator decomposition -- Planning, learning, and executing in autonomous systems -- Combining the expressivity of UCPOP with the efficiency of Graphplan -- Bounded parameter Markov decision processes -- Planning and search techniques for intelligent behaviour of battlefield entities -- Understanding and extending Graphplan -- Extending planning graphs to an ADL subset -- Breaking security protocols as an AI planning problem -- Time-oriented skeletal plans: Support to design and execution -- SINERGY: A linear planner based on genetic programming -- A case study on mergeability of cases with a partial-order planner -- Ignoring irrelevant facts and operators in plan generation -- A tabu search strategy to solve scheduling problems with deadlines and complex metric constraints -- Contingency selection in plan generation -- Approaching the plans are programs paradigm using transaction logic -- Event calculus planning revisited -- Constraint based reactive rescheduling in a stochastic environment -- Plan-refinement strategies and search-space size -- Replanning using hierarchical task network and operator-based planning -- BI-POMDP: Bounded, incremental partially-observable Markov-model planning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Planning, ECP'97, held in Toulouse, France, in September 1997. The 35 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. The range of topics covered spans all aspects of current artificial intelligence planning, from theoretical and foundational matters to actual planning of systems and applications in a variety of areas.