Temporal Plans and Resource Management

In previous work we have investigated a framework for distributed temporal plan repair. Using temporal constraints for activities to be executed, we developed a distributed algorithm capable of dealing with temporal changes (disruptions) in these constraints to perform fast plan repair. This framework, however, did not include resource management issues. In this paper, we extend our framework to incorporate resource allocation issues. Moreover, we present a decision mechanism for resource re-allocation using the notion of temporal flexibility. Based on this notion we discuss a flexibility heuristic in plan repair. Finally, we address the issue of plan quality measures, taking into account both individual agent preferences and global properties as plan robustness.