Scheduling with Complex Consumptive Resources for a Planetary Rover
Generating and scheduling activities is particularly challengingwhen considering both consumptive resources andcomplex resource interactions such as time-dependent resourceusage.We present three methods of determining validtemporal placement intervals for an activity in a temporallygrounded plan in the presence of such constraints.We introducethe Max Duration and Probe algorithms which aresound, but incomplete, and the Linear algorithm which issound and complete for linear rate resource consumption.We apply these techniques to the problem of schedulingawakes for a planetary rover where the awake durationsare affected by existing activities.We demonstrate how theProbe algorithm performs competitively with the Linear algorithmgiven an advantageous problem space and well-definedheuristics.We show that the Probe and Linear algorithmsoutperform the Max Duration algorithm empirically.We then empirically present the runtime differences betweenthe three algorithms.The Probe algorithm is currently base-linedfor use in the onboard scheduler for NASA’s next planetaryrover, the Mars 2020 rover.
This paper describes and analyzes three methods to schedule non-fixed duration activities in the presence of consumptive resources.The paper presents three approaches for on-board scheduling of activities in a planetary rover under reservoir resource constraints.