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.

O Plan is an AI planning architecture which supports research into a number of aspects of planning scheduling and control It is based on earlier work on the O Plan System which was directed towards plan generation The pa per explores the di erent types of choice or dering decisions which need to be made in an architecture for command and control The mechanisms for choice ordering and selection ...

Often, software managers have to monitor and manage many projects concurrently. Unfortunately, some projects were completed successfully but some were not completed on time, over budget or being cancelled. Some of the reasons of this project failure are: lack of user involvement, lack of planning, incomplete requirements, lack of resources, incorrect cost estimation, just to name a few. There a...

Complete planning and scheduling of all spacecraft operations is a challenging area with the remote agent experiment at Deep Space 1 being a pioneering system. Still the complete approach is rare in practice. For example, in the Mars Express (MEX) mission, planning and scheduling techniques are used to solve some subproblems namely scheduling command upload and data download. In this paper we d...

CRIKEY is a planner that separates out the scheduling from the classical parts of temporal planning. This can be seen as a relaxation of the temporal information during the classical planning phase. Relaxations in planning are used to guide the search. However, the quality of the relaxation greatly affects the performance of the planner, and in some cases can lead the search into a dead end. Th...

We present an auction-based approach to allocate tasks that have complex time constraints and interdependencies to a group of cooperative agents. The approach combines the advantages of planning and scheduling with the ability to make distributed decisions. We focus on methods for modeling and evaluating the decisions an agent must make when deciding how to schedule tasks. In particular, we dis...

The Space Propulsion Robust Analysis Tool (SPRAT) project is developing technology support Space Shuttle ground operations personnel as they manage and carry out mission preparation analysis and related analyses in missions. The initial SPRAT prototype provides intelligent support and automation for mission analysis set-up and documentation for Propulsion consumables analysis. SPRAT models the ...