Artificial Intelligence - Special issue on knowledge representation
Introduction to Algorithms
On Implementing Push-Relabel Method for the Maximum Flow Problem
Proceedings of the 4th International IPCO Conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization
Algorithms for a temporal decoupling problem in multi-agent planning
Eighteenth national conference on Artificial intelligence
Constraint Processing
Approximation algorithms for disjoint paths problems
Approximation algorithms for disjoint paths problems
Group decision making and temporal reasoning
Group decision making and temporal reasoning
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Air traffic in Europe is getting more and more congested with the turnaround process at airports as one of the most constraining factors. During this turnaround process, a number of services need to be provided to aircraft at the gate: de-boarding, cleaning, catering, fueling, etc. These services are provided by different agents (the service providers), who have to coordinate their activities in order to respect the turnaround time slot, the required service times and existing regulations. Usually, a global turnaround plan respecting all temporal dependencies is constructed. Such a global plan, however, has several disadvantages. First of all, it contains several (time)dependencies between agents, preventing them to optimize the scheduling of their activities autonomously. Secondly, in case of disruptions (and delays are common at any airport), re-planning is complex, time-consuming and will often affect all agents. The contribution of this paper in addressing this problem is twofold. First of all, we propose a method to \emph{decouple} the overall turnaround plan into local plans for each agent, allowing them to schedule their activities independently of one another. The decoupling method guarantees that the merging of all local schedules always satisfies the original set of plan constraints. Moreover, in case of disruptions, we could try to fix the local plans affected instead of repairing the global plan. Secondly, since by decoupling every agent now is free to choose its own schedule, each agent might select a schedule that optimizes its own objectives. Therefore, we show these benefits of decoupling in the turnaround process by developing a new algorithm that can be used by an agent to determine the minimum number of resources it requires to accomplish its ground handling task. We illustrate the application of this algorithm by determining the minimum number of vehicles a fueling agent will need in order to perform all its fueling services in the turnaround process.