IBM Scenario Planning Advisor: Plan recognition as AI planning in practice

Abstract

We present the IBM Research Scenario Planning Advisor (SPA), a decision support system that allows users to generate diverse alternate scenarios of the future and enhance their ability to imagine the different possible outcomes, including unlikely but potentially impactful futures. Our system, takes as input the relevant information from news and social media, representing key risk drivers, as well as the domain knowledge and generates scenarios that explain the key risk drivers and describe the alternative futures. To this end, we provide a characterization of the problem, knowledge engineering methodology, and transformation to AI planning. Furthermore, we describe the computation of the scenarios, lessons learned, and the feedback received from the pilot deployment of the SPA system in IBM.