Using Metric Temporal Logic to Specify Scheduling Problems

We introduce Scheduling MTL (SMTL) an extension of Metric Temporal Logic that supports the specification of complex scheduling problems with repeated and conditional occurrences of activities, and rich temporal relationships among them. We define the syntax and semantics of SMTL, and explore natural restrictions of the language to gain tractability. We also provide an algorithm for finding a schedule to a problem specified as an SMTL formula, and establish a novel equivalence between a fragment of MTL and simple temporal networks, a widely-used formalism in AI temporal planning.