32,139 research outputs found
Human-Machine Collaborative Optimization via Apprenticeship Scheduling
Coordinating agents to complete a set of tasks with intercoupled temporal and
resource constraints is computationally challenging, yet human domain experts
can solve these difficult scheduling problems using paradigms learned through
years of apprenticeship. A process for manually codifying this domain knowledge
within a computational framework is necessary to scale beyond the
``single-expert, single-trainee" apprenticeship model. However, human domain
experts often have difficulty describing their decision-making processes,
causing the codification of this knowledge to become laborious. We propose a
new approach for capturing domain-expert heuristics through a pairwise ranking
formulation. Our approach is model-free and does not require enumerating or
iterating through a large state space. We empirically demonstrate that this
approach accurately learns multifaceted heuristics on a synthetic data set
incorporating job-shop scheduling and vehicle routing problems, as well as on
two real-world data sets consisting of demonstrations of experts solving a
weapon-to-target assignment problem and a hospital resource allocation problem.
We also demonstrate that policies learned from human scheduling demonstration
via apprenticeship learning can substantially improve the efficiency of a
branch-and-bound search for an optimal schedule. We employ this human-machine
collaborative optimization technique on a variant of the weapon-to-target
assignment problem. We demonstrate that this technique generates solutions
substantially superior to those produced by human domain experts at a rate up
to 9.5 times faster than an optimization approach and can be applied to
optimally solve problems twice as complex as those solved by a human
demonstrator.Comment: Portions of this paper were published in the Proceedings of the
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 2016 and
in the Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in 2016. The paper
consists of 50 pages with 11 figures and 4 table
A Parametric Non-Convex Decomposition Algorithm for Real-Time and Distributed NMPC
A novel decomposition scheme to solve parametric non-convex programs as they
arise in Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) is presented. It consists of
a fixed number of alternating proximal gradient steps and a dual update per
time step. Hence, the proposed approach is attractive in a real-time
distributed context. Assuming that the Nonlinear Program (NLP) is
semi-algebraic and that its critical points are strongly regular, contraction
of the sequence of primal-dual iterates is proven, implying stability of the
sub-optimality error, under some mild assumptions. Moreover, it is shown that
the performance of the optimality-tracking scheme can be enhanced via a
continuation technique. The efficacy of the proposed decomposition method is
demonstrated by solving a centralised NMPC problem to control a DC motor and a
distributed NMPC program for collaborative tracking of unicycles, both within a
real-time framework. Furthermore, an analysis of the sub-optimality error as a
function of the sampling period is proposed given a fixed computational power.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure
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