Technical systems of the future are Companion Systems - cognitive technical systems that individualize their behavior to the current state and their current user: they adapt to a user’s capabilities, preferences, requirements, and current needs and take into account both the situation and the emotional state of the individual user. Furthermore, they are continually available, co-operative, and reliable, and appear as competent and empathic assistants to their users.

An important functionality to realize this vision is automated planning, i.e., the creation of individualized courses of action that provides assistance on how to reach a given goal. The research field of automated planning is not only concerned with the task of creating such plans (including the design of well-informed heuristics), but also with several related aspects, like, e.g.:

• the creation and analysis of the models needed for planning,
• the question on how the user can be integrated into the plan generation process,
• the reasoning about plans (How can the planning system, e.g., answer the user's questions about a given plan?),
• the application and presentation of plans (How is a plan presented to the user?), and
• the recognition of the user's behavior (What is the user's goal?).

The offered projects are concerned with the realization of different aspects of the given field. If you are interested in a project in this field - please contact us!