Temporal Summarization of Plans

In many planning and scheduling applications, the challenge for human planners is not so much to find a solution to a problem, but rather to explore a range of options and understand the tradeoffs inherent to them. Effective search through complex solution spaces requires technology that can help a human decision maker understand the key aspects of candidate solutions. This paper presents an approach to summarizing temporal plans that focuses on identifying noteworthy temporal features. These techniques look for regularities or exceptional temporal elements, drawing on a modest domain theory to drive the search process. An evaluation of the method on a suite of MER mission plans illustrates the potential of the approach.