Steps in Assessing a Timeline-Based Planner

The "timeline-based" is a particular paradigm of temporal planning that has been successfully applied in many real-world scenarios. Different timeline-based planning systems have been developed, each using its own planning specification language and solving techniques. An analysis of the differences between such kind systems has not been addressed yet. In previous work we have developed Epsl a planning tool successfully applied in real-world manufacturing scenarios. During subsequent projects our tool achieved a level of stability and a relative maturity. In this paper we start addressing the problem of comparison with other timeline-based planners and presents an analysis that concerns the Europa2 framework which can be considered the de-facto standard for timeline-based planning. In the present work we analyze the modeling and solving capabilities of the two frameworks. This phase of our study identifies differences and discusses strengths and weaknesses when solving the same problem.