Planning with Flexible Timelines in the Real World

Planning is a core field of Artificial Intelligence since its beginnings. Broadly speaking, planning techniques aim at providing artificial agents with the capability to autonomously solve ”complex” problems. Several planning techniques have been introduced in the literature that employ different approaches for modeling and solving planning problems. My PhD research activities concern timeline-based approach to planning. Timeline-based planning is a particular Temporal Planning paradigm which has been successfully applied to solve real-world problems. Despite it practical success there is not a shared view of this planning approach. There are several timeline-based frameworks that have been introduced in the literature each of which applies its own interpretation of timelines, timeline-based plans and planning domains. In this regard the objective of my PhD is to analyze the features of the different existing timeline-based systems and to provide a complete characterization of timeline-based approach by providing a semantics for the related planning concepts, defining a methodology to model domains and problems and by defining domain independent heuristics and develop a suited timeline-based planning framework, called EPSL.