Planning and scheduling

The design of autonomous systems able to interact with the environment to accomplish complex goals, such as intelligent agents, autonomous robots and unmanned vehicles, requires to reason about how and when to act, and about the effects of system actions in the world and along the timeline. Automated Planning and Scheduling (P&S) is the area of Artificial Intelligence which concerns models and techniques for synthesizing and maintaining plans of actions, strategies of execution, and resource allocation policies which allow us to realize complex tasks. More precisely, planning is the process of synthesizing sequences of actions or activities which accomplish a desired goal from an initial state, while scheduling focuses on the process of allocating given activities and resources in time while respecting various types of constraints such as capacity, precedence and duration.