---
title: "Temporal Planning with Mutual Exclusion Reasoning"
authors:
  - "David E. Smith"
  - "Daniel S. Weld"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1999/48"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1999/0048.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1999
pages: "326-336"
track: "Challenge Papers"
keywords:
---

# Temporal Planning with Mutual Exclusion Reasoning

David E. Smith, Daniel S. Weld

*Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 326-336.

## Abstract

Many planning domains require a richer notion of time in which actions can overlap and have different durations. The key to fast performance in classical planners (e.g., Graphplan, IPP, and Black box) has been the use of a disjunctive representation with powerful mutual exclusion reasoning. This paper presents TGP, a new algorithm for temporal planning. TGP operates by incrementally expanding a compact planning graph representation that handles actions of differing duration . The key to TGP performance is tight mutual exclusion reasoning which is based on an expressive language for bounding mutexes and includes mutexes between actions and propositions. Our experiments demonstrate that mutual exclusion reasoning remains valuable in a rich temporal setting.