The Epistemology of Scheduling Problems

Scheduling is a knowledge-intensive task spanning over many activities in day-to-day life. It deals with the temporallybound assignment of jobs to resources. Although scheduling has been extensively researched in the AI community for the past 30 years, efforts have primarily focused on specific applications, algorithms, or 'scheduling shells' and no comprehensive analysis exists on the nature of scheduling problems, which provides a formal account of what scheduling is, independently of the way scheduling problems can be approached. Research on KBS development by reuse makes use of ontologies, to provide knowledge-level specifications of reusable KBS components. In this paper we describe a task ontology, which formally characterises the nature of scheduling problems, independently of particular application domains and independently of how the problems can be solved. Our results provide a comprehensive, domain-independent and formally specified reference model for scheduling applications. This can be used as the basis for further analyses of the class of scheduling problems and also as a concrete reusable resource to support knowledge acquisition and system development in scheduling applications.