Supporting dispatchability in schedules with consumable resources

Abstract

Earlier work on scheduling by autonomous systems has demonstrated that schedules in the form of simple temporal networks, with intervals of values for possible event-times, can be made “dispatchable”, i.e. executable incrementally in real time with guarantees against failure due to unfortunate event-time selections. In this work we show how the property of dispatchability can be extended to networks that include constraints for consumable resources. We first determine conditions for insuring that resource use does not exceed capacity under dispatchable execution for a single sequence of activities, or “bout”, involving one resource. Then we show how to handle interactions between resource and temporal constraints to insure dispatchability, how to enhance flexibility of resource use under these conditions, and how to handle multiple bouts interspersed with instances of resource release. Finally, we consider methods for establishing the necessary dispatchability conditions during schedule creation (planning stage). The results demonstrate that flexible handling of resource use can be safely extended to the execution layer to provide more effective deployment of consumable resources.