Integrating planning and scheduling

Planning and scheduling research is becoming an increasingly interesting topic in the artificial intelligence area because of its immediate application to real problems. Although the last few years have seen dramatic advances in planning systems, they have not seen the same advances in the methods of solving planning and scheduling problems. In this paper, an intuitive way of integrating independent planning and scheduling processes is presented which achieves better performance in the process of solving planning and scheduling problems. The integrated system has the advantage of obtaining a final plan that is executable and optimal. Moreover, the system discards any partial plan as soon as the plan becomes invalid, improving its performance. Experience demonstrates the validity of this system for tackling planning and scheduling problems.