A continuous planning framework with durative actions

This paper describes a continuous planning framework to be used by a planning agent situated within an environment, which reasons about goals with priorities and deadlines, and actions with duration. The framework assumes that goals may be generated continuously, which requires the interleaving of planning and execution. Constraints upon time may mean it is not possible for all goals to be achieved-as a consequence the planning agent must be able to prioritise its goals. A crucial component of this framework is a temporal manager which enables the planner to reason about whether or not there is sufficient time available to achieve all goals, and to calculate deadlines for actions and outstanding subgoals. The main contribution of this paper is an examination of the way in which the partial order planning paradigm could be extended to reason with PDDL2.1 level 3 durative actions.