Weakening the non-self-overlap condition to open-interval overlap exclusion

Investigate whether the non-self-overlap condition for action scheduling in temporal planning can be soundly weakened by forbidding overlaps only of the open intervals (t_i, t_i + d_i) and (t_j, t_j + d_j), rather than forbidding overlaps of the closed intervals [t_i, t_i + d_i] and [t_j, t_j + d_j], and rigorously establish the resulting semantics’ correctness in the authors’ timed-automata encoding.

Background

The paper currently assumes a non-self-overlap constraint on actions to preserve decidability and correctness in the reduction to timed automata. This constraint determines how overlaps are treated in scheduling semantics.

The authors conjecture that a weaker constraint—excluding only open-interval overlaps rather than closed-interval overlaps—may suffice. Validating this change would potentially broaden the class of plans captured while retaining the desired properties of the encoding.