Timeline Planning in the J-TRE Environment

Timeline-based representations constitute a quite natural way to reason on time and resource constraints while planning. Additionally timeline-based planners have been demonstrated as successful in modeling and solving problems in several real world domains. In spite of these successes, any aspect related to search control remains a "black art" for few experts of the particular approach mostly because these architectures are huge application developments environments. For example, the exploration of alternative search techniques is quite hard. This paper proposes a general architecture for timeline-based reasoning that brings together key aspects of such reasoning leaving freedom to specific implementations on both constraint reasoning engines and resolution heuristics. Within such architecture, called J-tre, three different planners are built and compared with respect to a quite challenging reference problem. The experiments shed some light on key differences and pave the way for future works. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.