Fast Transformation of Temporal Plans for Efficient Execution

Temporal plans permit significant flexibility in specifying the occurrence time of events. Plan execution can make good use of that flexibility. However, the advantage of execution flexibility is counterbalanced by the cost during execution of propagating the time of occurrence of events throughout the flexible plan. To minimize execution latency, this propagation needs to be very efficient. Previous work showed that every temporal plan can be reformulated as a dispatchable plan, i.e., one for which propagation to immediate neighbors is sufficient. A simple algorithm was given that finds a dispatchable plan with a minimum number of edges in cubic time and quadratic space. In this paper, we focus on the efficiency of the reformulation process, and improve on that result. A new algorithm is presented that uses linear space and has time complexity equivalent to Johnson's algorithm for all-pairs shortest-path problems. Experimental evidence confirms the practical effectiveness of the...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Ioannis Tsamardinos, Nicola Muscettola, Paul H. Morris
• Keywords: AAAI 1998, Dispatchable Plan, Intelligent Agents, Plan Execution, Temporal Plan