On the Identification and Use of Hierarchical Resources in Planning and Scheduling

Proceedings of the
6th International Conference on AI Planning & Scheduling (AIPS'02)
Toulouse, France
23-27 April 2002

Many real-world planning applications have to deal with resource allocation problems, and so does planning in the domain of crisis management assistance. In order to support resource allocation in these kind of applications, we present a new approach to the integration of scheduling capabilities and planning. The proposed methodology relies on a hybrid planner, which combines action and state abstraction by integrating hierarchical task network (HTN) planning and state based partial order causal link (POCL) planning into a common framework. We extend the abstraction mechanism of the planner to different kinds of abstraction for resources, namely subsumption, approximation, qualification, and aggregation.

We show how these abstractions can be used when modeling the domain and how reasoning about resources can be performed in a flexible way, namely by merging opportunistic planning and scheduling strategies.

Online Copy

The paper is available as PDF (135 kB)

The presentation given at AIPS is available as PDF (149 kB)

BibTeX Entry

@InProceedings{schattenberg:biundo:02,
  author =    {Bernd Schattenberg and Susanne Biundo},
  title =     {On the Identification and Use of Hierarchical Resources
               in Planning and Scheduling},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on 
               AI Planning and Scheduling (AIPS'02)},
  pages =     {263-272},
  year =      {2002},
  editor =    {Malik Ghallab and Joachim Hertzberg and Paolo Traverso},
  address =   {Toulouse, France},
  publisher = {AAAI Press, Menlo Park, California},
  note =      {ISBN 0-1-57735-142-8}
}