On the Identification and Use of Hierarchical Resources in Planning and Scheduling

Many real-world planning applications have to deal with resource allocation problems, and so does planning in the domain of crisis management assistance. In order to support resource allocation in these kind of applications, we present a new approach to the integration of scheduling capabilities and planning. The proposed methodology relies on a hybrid planner, which combines action and state abstraction by integrating hierarchical task network (HTN) planning and state based partial order causal link (POCL) planning into a common framework. We extend the abstraction mechanism of the planner to different kinds of abstraction for resources, namely subsumption, approximation, qualification, and aggregation. We show how these abstractions can be used when modeling the domain and how reasoning about resources can be performed in a flexible way, namely by merging opportunistic planning and scheduling strategies.