Planning Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Causal reasoning suits a planner and numeric temporal reasoning suits a constraint or linear solver, so a plan is generated and then scheduled, with feedback if the schedule is infeasible. Solving jointly is possible and sometimes better but far harder. Correctness, timing and domains are not the reason. Decomposing a problem along the boundary between two mature technologies, and iterating between them, is a pragmatic architecture that appears throughout operations research.

Answer: B

Feedback from the scheduler to the planner, requesting a plan avoiding the bottleneck, is the standard arrangement, and the loop repeats until a feasible pair is found. Accepting violations and relaxing limits change the problem, and declaring insolubility is premature. An architecture in which two components negotiate, rather than one simply consuming the other's output, is what makes decomposition workable when the parts are not truly independent.

Answer: C

Handing the causal part to a planner and the numeric part to a scheduler lets each use decades of specialised development, at the cost of iterating when the decomposition is imperfect. Complexity is unchanged and optimality is generally lost. Organisational separation is a side effect rather than a benefit. Accepting a loss of optimality in exchange for being able to use two mature tools is a trade that should be made explicitly rather than by default.