Dealing with temporality on actions presents an important challenge to AI planning. Unlike Graphplan-based planners which
alternate levels of propositions and actions in a regular way, introducing temporality on actions unbalance this symmetry.
This paper presents TPSYS, a Temporal Planning SYStem, which arises as an attempt to combine the ideas of Graphplan and TGP to solve temporal planning problems more efficiently. TPSYS is based on a three-stage process. The first stage, a preprocessing
stage, facilitates the management of constraints on duration of actions. The second stage expands a temporal graph and obtains
the set of temporal levels at which propositions and actions appear. The third stage, the plan extraction, obtains the plan
of minimal duration by finding a flow of actions through the temporal graph. The experiments show the utility of our system
for dealing with temporal planning problems.
This work has been partially supported by the Project n. 20010017 - Navigation of Autonomous Mobile Robots of the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.