17 - Temporal Representation and Planning

Summary

This chapter is about planning approaches with explicit time in the descriptive and operational models of actions, as well as in the models of the expected evolution of the world not caused by the actor. It describes a planning algorithm that handles durative and concurrent activities with respect to a predicted dynamics. Section 17.1 presents a knowledge representation for modeling actions and tasks with temporal variables using temporal refinement methods. Temporal plans and planning problems are defined as chronicles, i.e., collections of assertions and tasks with explicit temporal constraints. A planning algorithm with temporal refinement methods is developed in Section 17.2. The basic techniques for managing temporal and domain constraints are then presented in Section 17.3.