In domains where planning is slow compared to the evolution of the environment, it can be important to take into account the time taken by the planning process itself. For one example, plans involving taking a certain bus are of no use if planning finishes after the bus departs. We call this setting situated temporal planning and we define it as a variant of temporal planning with timed initial literals.
Robots operating in the real world must perform their task in an uncertain, partially observable environment, while interacting with other robots. This interaction makes the problem much more difficult to solve. The key insight motivating this project is that it is possible to make the robot’s job online much easier by modifying the problem setting offline, before the robot starts operating by instituting a social law — a convention governing what is allowed behavior.
