Flexible Plan Verification: Feasibility Results

Timeline-based planning techniques have demonstrated wide application possibilities in heterogeneous real world domains. For a wider diffusion of this technology, a more thorough investigation of the connections with formal methods is needed. This paper is part of a research program aimed at studying the interconnections between timeline-based planning and standard techniques for formal validation and verification (V&V). In this line, an open issue consists of studying the link between plan generation and plan execution from the particular perspective of verifying temporal plans before their actual execution. The present work addresses the problem of verifying flexible temporal plans, i.e., those plans usually produced by least-commitment temporal planners. Such plans only impose minimal temporal constraints among the planned activities, hence are able to adapt to on-line environmental changes by trading some of the retained flexibility.