parcPlan: A Planning Architecture with Parallel Actions, Resources and Constraints

We describe the generic planning architecture parcPLAN, which uses constraint-solving to perform both temporal and non-temporal reasoning. The architecture allows considerable temporal sophistication in the specification of actions, integrity constraints and planning problems, and produces plans with a high degree of concurrency in action execution. A feature of parcPLAN is the capability to represent and minimise costs associated with plans. parcPLAN has been implemented in the Constraint Logic Programming language ECLiPSe, and performs well on large-scale planning and resource allocation problems.