Planning and Executing Office Procedures in Project ASPERA

An approach based on planning techniques is proposed in order to support the complex activity of a multi-office organization. The Italian Public Administration has been taken as an example and analyzed. The synthesis and the execution of procedures are investigated in an automated office based on knowledge about the organization structure, the documents and the rules that regulate the activity. A system is described whose aims are the formation of a plan that represents an executable specification of a procedure and the effective execution of the required operations. When an exception is raised, the planner is automatically invoked to update the plan according to the current state of the office system. A prototype has been built and tested on some applications within the domain of the Piedmont administrative procedures.