Scheduling problems occur in a lot of application fields such as production, timetabling and computer systems. These problems have already been widely studied and modeled (Carlier and Chrétienne, 1988; Pinedo, 1995; Pinedo and Chao, 1999; Vernadat, 1999). Each problem has its own characteristics; it is much more complicated when tackling real industrial problems. Starting from object-oriented t...

Software development processes are highly creative, and subject to frequent changes-making it hard to plan and schedule these processes in advance. Also, distributed projects cannot be planned centrally, especially if the involved parties are individual companies with their own areas of responsibility (as is the case in virtual Software corporations). On the other hand, certain aspects of the o...

Commitments play a central role in multi-agent coordination. However, they are inherently uncertain and it is important to take these uncertainties into account during planning and scheduling. This paper addresses the problem of handling the uncertainty in commitments. We propose a new model of commitment that incorporates the uncertainty, the use of contingency analysis to reduce the uncertain...

Many potential real-world planning applications are on the border of planning and scheduling. Consider a group of robots (like NASA’s Mars Rovers), that can maneuver over a designated area, perform soil tests, and can take pictures of interesting objects. There are many temporal and resource constraints that the robots have to satisfy while preforming any given set of tasks. For example, robots...

The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conducts the scien-tiic operations of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This paper describes several innovative systems which have been developed to support science operations, including proposal selection, planning and scheduling. The application of these techniques to other observatories and spacecraft is discussed as well.

This paper summarizes the main existing approaches to propagate resource constraints in Constraint-Based scheduling and identifies some of their limitations for using them in an integrated planning and scheduling framework. We then describe two new algorithms to propagate resource constraints on discrete resources and reservoirs. Unlike most of the classical work in scheduling, our algorithms f...

Planning and scheduling research is becoming an increasingly interesting topic in the Arti...cial Intelligence area, because of its immediate application to real problems. Although the last few years have seen dramatic advances in planning systems, they have not seen the same advances in the methods of solving planning and scheduling problems. In this paper, an intuitive way of integrating inde...