Dispatchable execution of schedules involving consumable resources

摘要

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 under which a component of the network composed of resource constraints associated with a single sequence of activities that use a resource ("bout") will support dispatchability. Then we show how to handle interactions between resource and temporal subnetworks to insure dispatchability and how to handle sequences of bouts interspersed with resource release. 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.