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Planning and execution with flexible timelines: a formal account

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Abstract

Planning for real world problems with explicit temporal constraints is a challenging problem. Among several approaches, the use of flexible timelines in Planning and Scheduling has been shown to be successful in a number of concrete applications, such as, for instance, autonomous space systems. This paper builds on previous work and presents a revised and extended formal account of flexible timelines with the aim of providing a general semantics for related planning concepts such as domains, goals, problems, constraints, and flexible plans. Some sources of uncertainty are also modeled in the proposed framework and taken into account in the characterization of valid plans that are assumed not to take decisions on components the planner cannot control. A formal definition of different forms of plan controllability is also proposed.

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Notes

  1. In this work, “timeline” refers to what Cialdea Mayer et al. [16] call a flexible timeline, while non-flexible timelines are called “scheduled timelines”. The latter are defined as particular cases of (flexible) timelines.

  2. For the same reason controllability tags are included in token descriptions.

  3. Cialdea Mayer and Orlandini [15] do not allow constraints on the behavior of external state variables.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of this work for pointing out some flaws in the original presentation, as well as for their valuable comments and suggestions. Andrea Orlandini acknowledges the support of the FourByThree project (H2020—Factories of the Future—G.A. nr. 637095).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Rome, Italy

    Marta Cialdea Mayer & Alessandro Umbrico

  2. Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Rome, Italy

    Andrea Orlandini

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  1. Marta Cialdea Mayer
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  2. Andrea Orlandini
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  3. Alessandro Umbrico
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Correspondence to Marta Cialdea Mayer.

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Cialdea Mayer, M., Orlandini, A. & Umbrico, A. Planning and execution with flexible timelines: a formal account. Acta Informatica 53, 649–680 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-015-0252-z

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