Concurrent Action Execution with Shared Fluents

Concurrent action execution is important for plan-length minimization. However, action specifications are often limited to avoid conflicts arising from precondition/effect interactions. PDDL — the planning domain definition language — for example, implements the “no moving targets” rule, which means that no two actions can simultaneously make use of a value if one of the two is updating the value. This rule poses problems for resource allocation planning in which resource values are accessed in preconditions and effects. A simple example is construction actions that consume certain amounts of a resource. For speeding up plan execution, we would like to be able to dispatch several construction actions simultaneously. Because action preconditions depend on resource values and action effects change them, the “no moving targets” rule does not allow concurrent execution. However, if sufficient resources are available, executing actions simultaneously poses no problems. This...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Michael Buro, Alexander Kovarsky
• Keywords: AAAI 2007, Action Preconditions, Concurrent Action Execution, Intelligent Agents, No Moving Targets