Temporal and Resource Reasoning in Planning: the parcPLAN approach.

Abstract

. This paper presents a new approach to the task of integrating temporal and resource reasoning in planning. The specific task is essentially a disjunctive scheduling problem complicated by three interdependent factors, (1) multiple capacity resources, (2) action overlap and (3) variable action duration. The approach uses Boolean meta-variables to link temporal and resource reasoning and is implemented in the CLP language ECL i PS e . Empirical studies indicate that the technique significantly enhances the search for plan feasibility and serves to minimise the effort of generating a plan using the least number of actions. 1 INTRODUCTION The task of integrating resource reasoning and scheduling presents a significant challenge to AI planning. Scheduling actions with respect to available resources involves reasoning about the degree to which actions can or must overlap; it also involves reasoning about the duration of actions, which may vary according to the resources available. We ...