Practical Temporal Reasoning for Real Scheduling Applications

The day-to-day operations of large-scale enterprises give rise to a wide variety of scheduling problems in such areas as manufacturing, logistics and transportation, and spacecraft operations. Building useful tools for these applications requires a set of capabilities determined both by structural properties of the problems being solved and by teleology specifically, by how schedules are used by organizations. The constraints imposed by these functions and choices made in their implementation affect in fundamental ways the system’s expressive and inferential requirements.