1 Application of planning techniques for system configuration tasks R. Barruffi (1) , E.Lamma (1) , P.Mello (2) , M.Milano (1) (1) DEIS, Università di Bologna Viale Risorgimento 2, 40136 Bologna, Italy {rbarruffi,elamma,mmilano}@deis.unibo.it (2) Istituto di Ingegneria, Università di Ferrara Via Saragat, 41100 Ferrara, Italy {pmello}@ing.unife.it} Abstract The management of networked computer systems is rapidly growing in complexity due to the advent of Internet and Intranets. The paradigm has shifted from management of single systems to the management of complex domains, where an increasing number of machines are interconnected. In this context the traditional approach to performing configuration tasks, which consists of writing procedural applications, becomes inadequate. Planning techniques allow to dynamically synthesize action plans by using basic building blocks, coded with pre and post conditions. This approach is much more flexible in fact it’s possible to manage unexpected situations and updating of the system without changing the set of basic actions. As far as software for system management is concerned planning techniques almost represent a novel approach. In fact past efforts that we are aware of, though providing remarkable results, only tackled a limited subset of the problem. In order to solve complex configuration problems we need to build a powerful planner which intertwines the creation of partial plans (each corresponding to the achievement of a subgoal) with the resolution of threats among them (deriving from the interference among subgoals). The aim of this paper is to show the power and the limits of the application of an already existing planner to configuration tasks so as to understand which features are needed by a planner suitable for computer systems. We chose UCPOP [7], a regressive non- linear planner. As a case study, we have applied UCPOP to a typical configuration problem: an example of disk management on an HPUX system [8]. It consists of a non trivial goal which requires a multilevel plan of basic action. We need to fill the gap between the classical assumptions of a planning algorithm and the handling of a real system. Future work will concern the study of how to overcome these limits and the investigation on how to use Constraint Satisfaction techniques [6] in order to increase the efficiency of the planner. 1 Introduction The advent of Internet with all its world-wide information resources has made the complexity of networked computer systems rapidly increase.