Modeling and Verification for Planning and Scheduling in a Workflow Framework

The integration of Planning and Scheduling (P&S) and Workflow is a significant challenge for knowledge acquisition in planning and scheduling. There have been some works on the definition of workflow that allows non-expert entering domain knowledge to be used in planning and scheduling. In order to analyze and verify the rationality of the planning and scheduling domain model, we extend the workflow model in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) to handle the temporal constraints. And we introduce Hierarchically Timed Petri Net (HTPN) as an analysis tool, and present a new algorithm to check the temporal consistency. With the analysis and verification, we can avoid the incorrectness and inconsistencies in the modeling phase, consequently reduce the unnecessary search space in the planning and scheduling phase.