Experiments with a decision-theoretic scheduler

Abstract

This paper describes DTS, a decision-theoretic scheduler designed to employ state-of-the-art probabilistic inference technology to speed the search for efficient solutions to constraint-satisfaction problems. Our approach involves assessing the performance of heuristic control strategies that are normally hard-coded into scheduling systems, and using probabilistic inference to aggregate this information in light of features of a given problem. BPS, the Bayesian Problem-Solver, introduced a similar approach to solving single-agent and adversarial graph search problems, yielding orders-of-magnitude improvement over traditional techniques. Initial efforts suggest that similar improvements will be realizable when applied to typical constraint-satisfaction scheduling problems.