The Role of Different Solvers in Planning and Scheduling Integration

This paper attempts to analyze the issue of planning and scheduling integration from the point of view of information sharing. This concept is the basic bridging factor between the two realms of problem solving. In fact, the exchange of each solver’s point of view on the problem to be solved allows for a synergetic effort in the process of searching the space of states. In this work, we show how different solving strategies cooperate in this process by varying the degree of integration of the combined procedure. In particular, the analysis exposes the advantage of propagating sets of partial plans rather than reasoning on sequential state space representations. Also, we show how this is beneficial both to a component-based approach (in which information sharing occurs only once) and to more interleaved forms of integration.