Planning to plan — Integrating control flow

In many planning situations, computation itself becomes a resource to be planned and scheduled. We model such computational resources as conventional resources which are used by control-flow actions, e.g., to direct the planning process. Control-flow actions and conventional actions are planned/scheduled in an integrated way and can interact with each other. Control-flow actions are then executed by the planning engine itself. The approach is illustrated by examples, e.g., for hierarchical planning, in which tasks that are temporally still far away impose only rough constraints on the current schedule, and control-flow tasks ensure that these tasks are refined as they approach the current time. Using the same mechanism, anytime algorithms can change appropriate search methods or parameters over time, and problems like scheduling critical time-outs for garbage collection can be made part of the planning itself.