Temporal planning with constants in context

Abstract

Required concurrency can cause actions to interfere with running continuous effects. This interference can modify the rate of change, including the polarity, of a continuous effect. In this work, we propose a mechanism to support discrete interference of rates of change caused by instantaneous actions, the start and end endpoints of other durative actions, and numeric timed initial fluents. Current temporal planners have very limited support for such numeric dynamics. COLIN reduces a temporal numeric planning problem to a linear program (LP), but operates on an implicit assumption that the rate of change of a durative action’s continuous effect is constant throughout its execution. In this work we propose some enhancements to the algorithms used in COLIN, in order to support discrete interference of continuous effects, and a new planner, DICE, was developed to implement them.