Timelines with Temporal Uncertainty

Abstract

Timelines are a formalism to model planning domains where the  temporal aspects are predominant, and have been used in many  real-world applications. Despite their practical success, a major limitation is the inability  to model temporal uncertainty, i.e. the plan executor cannot decide  the duration of some activities.

In this paper we make two key contributions. First, we propose a comprehensive, semantically well founded framework that  (conservatively) extends with temporal uncertainty the state of the  art timeline approach. Second, we focus on the problem of producing time-triggered plans  that are robust with respect to temporal uncertainty, under a  bounded horizon. In this setting, we present the first complete  algorithm, and we show how it can be made practical by leveraging  the power of Satisfiability Modulo Theories.