Temporal Reasoning for Planning and Scheduling in Complex Domains: Lessons Learned
Mark Boddy · 1996
Over the past five years, we have implemented and applied efficient, general-purpose temporal reasoning as a substrate for building planning and scheduling systems. We have also investigated the kinds of temporal reasoning that will be most useful, and for what problems. Our results confirm that temporal reasoning is a sufficiently self-contained activity to be implemented entirely independently of the overlying application, modulo some assumptions about how problem-solving is to proceed. We have also shown that constraint-based temporal reasoning supports a "least-commitment" style of planning and scheduling that is efficacious in a wide variety of complex problem domains. There have been some surprises, as well, for example in the fact that causal reasoning in general, and projection in particular, have been less useful than we anticipated. In this