Planning with Disjunctive Temporal Constraints

Many real-world problems contain elements of both planning and scheduling problems. In response, many frameworks and systems have been developed that add scheduling abilities to planning systems. We continue this trend by presenting a framework and algorithm for planning with disjunctive temporal constraints. We define a constraint-based interval (CBI) framework for describing a planning problem with disjunctive temporal constraints, which we call a disjunctive temporal planning problem (DTPP). We also describe the Disjunctive Temporal Partial-Order Planner (DT-POP), a planning algorithm that is capable of solving DTPP’s, and analyze several techniques for improving its efficiency. Although the current implementation of DT-POP is not yet competitive with other planning systems in terms of efficiency, it is more expressive in terms of complex temporal constraints. We offer several ideas for improving the efficiency of DTPOP in the future, in hopes that the current work will be the beginning of an interesting line of research.

[1]  Rina Dechter,et al.  Temporal Constraint Networks , 1989, Artif. Intell..

[2]  Nicola Muscettola,et al.  HSTS: Integrating Planning and Scheduling , 1993 .

[3]  Thomas Schiex,et al.  Nogood Recording for static and dynamic constraint satisfaction problems , 1993, Proceedings of 1993 IEEE Conference on Tools with Al (TAI-93).

[4]  Malik Ghallab,et al.  Representation and Control in IxTeT, a Temporal Planner , 1994, AIPS.

[5]  Martha E. Pollack,et al.  Passive and active decision postponement in plan generation , 1996 .

[6]  Manolis Koubarakis,et al.  Backtracking algorithms for disjunctions of temporal constraints , 1998, Artif. Intell..

[7]  Henrik Reif Andersen,et al.  Difference Decision Diagrams , 1999, CSL.

[8]  David E. Smith,et al.  Temporal Planning with Mutual Exclusion Reasoning , 1999, IJCAI.

[9]  M. Fox,et al.  Efficient Implementation of the Plan Graph in STAN , 2011, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[10]  Enrico Giunchiglia,et al.  SAT-Based Procedures for Temporal Reasoning , 1999, ECP.

[11]  David E. Smith,et al.  Bridging the gap between planning and scheduling , 2000, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[12]  Bernhard Nebel,et al.  The FF Planning System: Fast Plan Generation Through Heuristic Search , 2011, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[13]  Nicola Muscettola,et al.  Dynamic Control Of Plans With Temporal Uncertainty , 2001, IJCAI.

[14]  Subbarao Kambhampati,et al.  Reviving Partial Order Planning , 2001, IJCAI.

[15]  D. Long,et al.  Bridging the Modelling Gap : Examining the Expressiveness of Planning Domain Description Languages , 2002 .

[16]  David E. Smith.  The Case for Durative Actions: A Commentary on PDDL2.1 , 2003, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[17]  Martha E. Pollack,et al.  Efficient solution techniques for disjunctive temporal reasoning problems , 2003, Artif. Intell..

[18]  Maria Fox,et al.  PDDL2.1: An Extension to PDDL for Expressing Temporal Planning Domains , 2003, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[19]  M. Fox,et al.  The 3rd International Planning Competition: Results and Analysis , 2003, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[20]  Mark S. Boddy.  Imperfect Match: PDDL 2.1 and Real Applications , 2003, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[21]  Jeremy Frank,et al.  Constraint-Based Attribute and Interval Planning , 2003, Constraints.