Constraint Programming Approach to the TAEMS Scheduling Problem

Planning and Scheduling are well-recognized research areas in the field of AI that address goal directed problem solving. They deal with choosing a course of action to achieve a goal contingent upon some sequencing and temporal constraints. TAEMS, (acronym for Task Analysis, Environment Modeling, an...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Datta, Soumita
Other Authors: Gabor Karsai
Format: Others
Language:en
Published: VANDERBILT 2006
Subjects:
Online Access:http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-04012006-154337/
Description
Summary:Planning and Scheduling are well-recognized research areas in the field of AI that address goal directed problem solving. They deal with choosing a course of action to achieve a goal contingent upon some sequencing and temporal constraints. TAEMS, (acronym for Task Analysis, Environment Modeling, and Simulation) is a modeling language for describing the task structures of agents. The TAEMS planning and scheduling problem is a particular case, where the actions that need to be scheduled to accomplish a root task are presented in a graph like structure. This problem is an NP-hard problem requiring search through a possibly exponential sized solution space.<p> This thesis aims at generating the basic initial schedule for a TAEMS style objective task structure using constraint programming techniques. Solving this initial planning and scheduling problem using constraint programming techniques involves encoding the TAEMS problem as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem, solving the Constraint Satisfaction Problem using various solver search techniques and decoding the solution into a TAEMS plan and schedule. The advantage of using the Constraint Programming approach is that the built-in search techniques of a solver can be utilized instead of implementing hand-crafted algorithms in a high level language. The thesis explains the techniques developed and provides the results of an experimental evaluation.