An Approach to Planning Multi-Phase Projects
Amol Dattatraya Mali · 2016
We define Multiphase Project Planning (MPP) as the problem of finding an executable sequence of sets of actions to achieve all hard subgoals of all milestones, given a fully-specified initial state, milestones and their subgoals, the utilities associated with their achievement, preconditions and effects of operators, action costs, events known to occur during the course of the project, rewards and penalties associated with an achievement and abandonment of soft subgoals, and rewards for an earlier achievement of subgoals, assuming deterministic actions, perfect perception, and a fully observable environment such that all relevant changes to the environment and the times of their occurrence are known in advance. We present a constraint-based approach to solving this problem. The constraints we identify serve as a foundation for solving MPP by generating and solving a logical encoding or a linear program or a set of constraints in a more expressive language or combination of these, with or without domainspecific knowledge.