Handling shared resources in a temporal data base management system

• Authors: Thomas L. Dean
• Venue: COCS '86 Proceedings of the third ACM-SIGOIS conference on Office information systems
• Year: 1986

An important component of planning involves keeping track of what various agents intend to do and recognizing situations in which certain planned-for activities are likely to interfere with one another. In planning situations involving several agents participating in a cooperative endeavor, this process can be automated to a high degree thereby facilitating coordination between agents. The more difficult aspects of planning, how to choose what activities to perform and what to do when those choices lead to problems, are left to the agents themselves. This paper demonstrates how the use of an interactive temporal data base management system can direct the inter-agent communication necessary to coordinate the use of shared resources and deal with complex scheduling problems. It is argued that much of the paper work normally associated with routine office transactions can be eliminated through the use of this temporal data base.