Incrementally scheduling with qualitative temporal information

Abstract

Scheduling is typically a quantitative engineering problem involving tasks and constraints. However, there are many real life situations where the input is qualitative in nature and any quantitative information is neither available nor cared for. We address here such a qualitative scheduling problem with disjunctive temporal constraints between the tasks. The problem we address is incremental in nature, where a new task is added to a committed schedule. We not only find a valid schedule when it exists, but also analyze the causes of inconsistency otherwise. This is new direction of research. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.