The Constraint-Based Planning Project focuses on the study and development of autonomous planning for complex domains. We develop the infrastructure for projects that require planning and scheduling technology, rather than develop software for a particular mission.

EUROPA 2, is the next generation of the Extensible Universal Remote Operations Architecture. Like the CLARATy robotics control architecture, MDS, or ILOG, EUROPA 2, is a component-based software library for representation and reasoning with plans and schedules. Our goal in developing EUROPA 2, is to provide a fast, flexible, extensible, reusable technology platform for building planning and scheduling applications suitable for space exploration.

EUROPA has been the core planning technology for a variety of NASA-relevant research and mission applications. A notable example is MAPGEN, the ground-based daily activity planning system for the Mars Exploration Rover mission. EUROPA in turn is derived from HSTS which was the planner for the Remote Agent. EUROPA 2, builds on the legacies of EUROPA and HSTS and provides improvements in performance, expressivity, reasoning capabilities, flexibility, extensibility, and modularity which has opened the technology to a broader range of planning and scheduling techniques.

EUROPA 2 includes a declarative language for domain and problem specification, a plan database for internal partial plan representation, a constraint engine, a resource engine, a temporal engine, a rules engine for subgoal control, decision management and a chronological backtracking planner as a sample planner.

EUROPA 2 comes with PlanWorks, a constraint-based plan visualization environment that can be used in conjunction with EUROPA or EUROPA 2 to visualize partial plans and to control the planner on any problem domain.