Damage Control Domain: Using Petri Nets for Intelligent Scheduling

Many Artificial Intelligence decision-making systems operate in cycles. A typical problem-solving cycle might consist of deliberation, scheduling, and execution steps. At the deliberation step a number of feasible actions are generated. They are then evaluated by a scheduler at the scheduling step and the most suitable action is performed at the execution step. This paper presents a scheduling approach that uses the mathematically well-founded framework of Petri Nets as an environment model. The paper extends the classical Petri Nets (PT-nets) model in various ways and shows their applications to the test-bed domain of ship damage control. The use of a scheduler based on Time Interval Petri Nets in the domain of ship damage control resulted in 21 of 160 ships being lost in an immersive simulated environment. This is a 46% improvement over the performance of subject experts where 39 ships were lost.