Section 2 : Planning with time and resource constraints

Commentary

Section Goals

• To discuss the representation and principle of planning problems with time and resource constraints.

Learning Objectives

Learning Objective 1

• Outline the representation of time and resource constraints in planning problems.
• Explain the principle of scheduling problems involving time and resources.
• Explain the idea of hierarchical task network planning, and how action decompositions are represented and handled.
• Explain the following concepts or terms:
  • Critical path method
  • Reusable resource
  • Hierarchical task networks (HTN)
  • Possible world
  • Action decomposition
  • Subtask sharing

Objective Readings

Required readings:

Planning and Acting in the Real World (see Sections 11.1 - 11.3 of AIMA3ed).

Objective Questions

• What is the difference between scheduling and planning?
• How are time and resources represented in planning problems?
• What is the difference between entailment and inference?

Objective Activities

• Explore other tasks in the real world, and figure out how to solve them based on the ideas introduced in this section.