Constraint satisfaction techniques in planning and scheduling: An introduction

Abstract

Planning and scheduling are two closely related areas that, despite their similarity, deal with different problems. While the planning task is to decide which actions are necessary to achieve a given goal, the scheduling task is to allocate known activities to scarce resources, such as machines, over time.

Typically planning and scheduling problems are solved separately using different solving techniques. However, real-life problems require a more integrated approach.

Constraint satisfaction seems to be such a unifying solving technology for both planning and scheduling problems. This paper describes how constraint satisfaction techniques can be applied to planning and scheduling problems.

Keywords

• Constraint
• satisfaction
• techniques
• planning
• scheduling
• introduction