Does MDS use some AI trick to create a plan for accomplishing a goal?
A3: There are no “tricks” – MDS’s Mission Planning and Execution Component (“MPE”) builds off of some well-established AI search algorithms. Scheduling a goal network involves specifying additional temporal constraints between timepoints in the network, to ensure that goals with incompatible state constraints are not executed concurrently. The search is performed across the set of possible alternative elaborations for each goal. If an initial choice of goal elaborations results in a conflict on a state variable, no matter how you schedule it, then the search backtracks on the last elaborated goal, chooses another elaboration and tries to schedule once again.
