Required concurrency can cause actions to interfere with running
continuous effects. This interference can modify the rate of change,
including the polarity, of a continuous effect. In this work, we
propose a mechanism to support discrete interference of rates of
change caused by instantaneous actions, the start and end endpoints
of other durative actions, and numeric timed initial fluents.
Current temporal planners have very limited support for such
numeric dynamics. COLIN reduces a temporal numeric planning
problem to a linear program (LP), but operates on an implicit
assumption that the rate of change of a durative action’s continuous
effect is constant throughout its execution. In this work we propose
some enhancements to the algorithms used in COLIN, in order
to support discrete interference of continuous effects, and a new
planner, DICE, was developed to implement them.peer-reviewe
