Modeling temporal relations in task hierarchies for job shop scheduling

An overview of the cooperative scheduling system is presented, and the techniques used to represent and reason about the temporal relations between the tasks to be scheduled by the system are described. The approach taken models the temporal relations in a graph whose vertices are points in time and whose edges represent the temporal constraints between them as described by T.L. Dean (1985). The representation is extended, however, by using a general caching algorithm, independent time maps linked to each other by pointers, and an explicitly hierarchical arrangement of these time maps