Complete Determination of Parallel Actions and Temporal Optimization in Linear Plans of Action

Traditional non-linear planners (NOAH, NONLIN, SIPE, ...) construct plans of actions by progressively introducing and partially ordering actions in the initial plan to satisfy a set of constraints. On the other hand, our method, using the triangle table formalism, enables linear planners to easily determine, in linear (over constrained) plans, all actions which can be executed in parallel (removing from the linear plan all the artificial order constraints). This information may then be used by a classical algorithm to optimize the resulting plan's execution time.