Workflow resource pattern modelling and visualization

Workflow patterns have been recognized as the theoretical basis to modeling recurring problems in workflow systems. A form of workflow patterns, known as the resource patterns, characterise the behaviour of resources in workflow systems. Despite the fact that many resource patterns have been discovered, people still preclude them from many workflow system implementations. One of reasons could be obscurityin the behaviour of and interaction between resources and a workflow management system. Thus, we provide a modelling and visualization approach for the resource patterns, enabling a resource behaviour modeller to intuitively see the specific resource patterns involved in the lifecycle of a workitem. We believe this research can be extended to benefit not only workflow modelling, but also other applications, such as model validation, human resource behaviour modelling, and workflow model visualization

Hierarchical task network approach for time and budget constrained construction project planning

© 2019 The Author(s). Completing a construction project on time and within budget is of great importance in the construction industry. To achieve this goal, a construction plan satisfying the time and cost constraints is crucial. While a rich amount of literature on the time-cost trade-off scheduling and time/cost optimization scheduling has been presented, developing a construction plan for the time and cost-constrained construction project has not been fully explored. This study presented a hierarchical task network (HTN) based construction planning model to fill this gap. First of all, a knowledge formalism catering to the HTN planning was provided to accommodate the construction planning knowledge. Then, the planning process was explained in detail, including temporal reasoning used to sequence the construction activities, and backtracking evasion mechanism used to avoid the trouble of backtracking due to inappropriate selection of execution modes for construction activities. Finally, two sets of comparisons based on a fictional construction project were performed, the results of which demonstrate that the time and budget constraints have an impact on the sec-tion of execution modes for construction methods, and the proposed planning model can develop construction plan that satisfies the specified deadline and budget limitations effectively regardless of the existing of backtracking

Knowledge engineering techniques for automated planning

Formulating knowledge for use in AI Planning engines is currently some-thing of an ad-hoc process, where the skills of knowledge engineers and the tools they use may significantly influence the quality of the resulting planning application. There is little in the way of guidelines or standard procedures, however, for knowledge engineers to use when formulating knowledge into planning domain languages such as PDDL. Also, there is little published research to inform engineers on which method and tools to use in order to effectively engineer a new planning domain model. This is of growing importance, as domain independent planning engines are now being used in a wide range of applications, with the consequence that op-erational problem encodings and domain models have to be developed in a standard language. In particular, at the difficult stage of domain knowledge formulation, changing a statement of the requirements into something for-mal - a PDDL domain model - is still somewhat of an ad hoc process, usually conducted by a team of AI experts using text editors. On the other hand, the use of tools such as itSIMPLE or GIPO, with which experts gen-erate a high level diagrammatic description and automatically generate the domain model, have not yet been proven to be more effective than hand coding. The major contribution of this thesis is the evaluation of knowledge en-gineering tools and techniques involved in the formulation of knowledge. To support this, we introduce and encode a new planning domain called Road Traffic Accidents (RTA), and discuss a set of requirements that we have derived, in consultation with stakeholders and analysis of accident management manuals, for the planning part of the management task. We then use and evaluate three separate strategies for knowledge formulation, encoding domain models from a textual, structural description of require-ments using (i) the traditional method of a PDDL expert and text editor (ii) a leading planning GUI with built in UML modelling tools (iii) an object-based notation inspired by formal methods. We evaluate these three ap-proaches using process and product metrics. The results give insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches, highlight lessons learned regarding knowledge encoding, and point to important lines of research for knowledge engineering for planning. In addition, we discuss a range of state-of-the-art modelling tools to find the types of features that the knowledge engineering tools possess. These features have also been used for evaluating the methods used. We bench-mark our evaluation approach by comparing it with the method used in the previous International Competition for Knowledge Engineering for Plan-ning & Scheduling (ICKEPS). We conclude by providing a set of guide-lines for building future knowledge engineering tools

An Ontological Framework for Context-Aware Collaborative Business Process Formulation

In cross-enterprise collaborative environment, we have dealt with challenges in business process integration for common business goals. Research directions in this domain range from business to business integration (B2Bi) to service-oriented augmentation. Ontologies are used in Business Process Management (BPM) to reduce the gap between the business world and information technology (IT), especially in the context of cross enterprise collaboration. For a dynamic collaboration, virtual enterprises need to establish collaborative processes with appropriate matching levels of tasks. However, the problem of solving the semantics mismatching is still not tackled or even harder in case of querying space between different enterprise profiles as considered as ontologies. This article presents a framework based on the ontological and context awareness during the task integration and matching in order to form collaborative processes in the manner of cross enterprise collaboration

On the automatic compilation of e-learning models to planning

[EN] This paper presents a general approach to automatically compile e-learning models to planning, allowing us to easily generate plans, in the form of learning designs, by using existing domain-independent planners. The idea is to compile, first, a course defined in a standard e-learning language into a planning domain, and, second, a file containing students learning information into a planning problem. We provide a common compilation and extend it to three particular approaches that cover a full spectrum of planning paradigms, which increases the possibilities of using current planners: (i) hierarchical, (ii) including PDDL (Planning Domain Definition Language) actions with conditional effects and (iii) including PDDL durative actions. The learning designs are automatically generated from the plans and can be uploaded, and subsequently executed, by learning management platforms. We also provide an extensive analysis of the e-learning metadata specification required for planning, and the pros and cons on the knowledge engineering procedures used in each of the three compilations. Finally, we include some qualitative and quantitative experimentation of the compilations in several domain-independent planners to measure its scalability and applicability.This work has been supported by the Spanish MICINN under projects TIN2008-06701-C03 and Consolider Ingenio 2010 CSD2007-00022, by the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology and the regional projects CCG08-UC3M/TIC-4141 and Prometeo GVA 2008/051.Garrido Tejero, A.; Fernandez, S.; Onaindia De La Rivaherrera, E.; Morales, L.; Borrajo, D.; Castillo, L. (2013). On the automatic compilation of e-learning models to planning. Knowledge Engineering Review. 28(2):121-136. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269888912000380S121136282Garrido A. , Onaindía E. 2010. On the application of planning and scheduling techniques to E-learning. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Industrial, Engineering & Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems (IEA-AIE 2010)—Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6096, 244–253. Springer.Ullrich C 2008. Pedagogically founded courseware generation for web-based learning, No. 5260, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 5260, Springer.Sicilia M.A. , Sánchez-Alonso S. , García-Barriocanal E. 2006. On supporting the process of learning design through planners. CEUR Workshop Proceedings: Virtual Campus 2006 Post-Proceedings. Barcelona, Spain, 186(1), 81–89.IMSLD 2003. IMS Learning Design Specification. Version 1.0 (February, 2003). Retrieved December, 2012, from http://www.imsglobal.org/learningdesign.Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) 2004. Retrieved December, 2012, from http://scorm.com.Garrido A. , Onaindia E. , Morales L. , Castillo L. , Fernandez S. , Borrajo D. 2009. Modeling E-learning activities in automated planning. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (ICKEPS-2009), Thessaloniki, Greece, 18–27.Essalmi, F., Ayed, L. J. B., Jemni, M., Kinshuk, & Graf, S. (2010). A fully personalization strategy of E-learning scenarios. Computers in Human Behavior, 26(4), 581-591. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2009.12.010Camacho D. , R-Moreno M.D. , Obieta U. 2007. CAMOU: a simple integrated e-learning and planning techniques tool. In 4th International Workshop on Constraints and Language Processing, Roskilde University, Denmark, 1–11.Fox, M., & Long, D. (2003). PDDL2.1: An Extension to PDDL for Expressing Temporal Planning Domains. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 20, 61-124. doi:10.1613/jair.1129KONTOPOULOS, E., VRAKAS, D., KOKKORAS, F., BASSILIADES, N., & VLAHAVAS, I. (2008). An ontology-based planning system for e-course generation. Expert Systems with Applications, 35(1-2), 398-406. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2007.07.034Fuentetaja R. , Borrajo D. , Linares López C. 2009. A look-ahead B&B search for cost-based planning. In Proceedings of CAEPIA'09, Murcia, Spain, 105–114.Limongelli C. , Sciarrone F. , Vaste G. 2008. LS-plan: an effective combination of dynamic courseware generation and learning styles in web-based education. In Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems, 5th International Conference, AH 2008, Nejdl, W., Kay, J., Pu, P. & Herder, E. (eds.)., 133–142. Springer.Castillo L. , Fdez.-Olivares J. , García-Perez O. Palao F. 2006. Efficiently handling temporal knowledge in an HTN planner. In Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2006), Borrajo, D. & McCluskey, L. (eds.). AAAI, 63–72.Castillo, L., Morales, L., González-Ferrer, A., Fdez-Olivares, J., Borrajo, D., & Onaindía, E. (2009). Automatic generation of temporal planning domains for e-learning problems. Journal of Scheduling, 13(4), 347-362. doi:10.1007/s10951-009-0140-xUllrich, C., & Melis, E. (2009). Pedagogically founded courseware generation based on HTN-planning. Expert Systems with Applications, 36(5), 9319-9332. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2008.12.043Boticario J. , Santos O. 2007. A dynamic assistance approach to support the development and modelling of adaptive learning scenarion based on educational standards. In Proceedings of Workshop on Authoring of Adaptive and Adaptable Hypermedia, International Conference on User Modelling, Corfu, Greece, 1–8.IMSMD 2003. IMS Learning Resource Meta-data Specification. Version 1.3 (August, 2006). Retrieved December, 2012, from http://www.imsglobal.org/metadata.Mohan P. , Greer J. , McCalla G. 2003. Instructional planning with learning objects. In IJCAI-03 Workshop Knowledge Representation and Automated Reasoning for E-Learning Systems, Acapulco, Mexico, 52–58.Alonso C. , Honey P. 2002. Honey-alonso Learning Style Theoretical Basis (in Spanish). Retrieved December 2012, from http://www.estilosdeaprendizaje.es/menuprinc2.htm

Machine learning in hybrid hierarchical and partial-order planners for manufacturing domains

The application of AI planning techniques to manufacturing Systems is being widely deployed for all the tasks involved in the process, from product design to production planning and control. One of these problems is the automatic generation of control sequences for the entire manufacturing system in such a way that final plans can be directly use das the sequential control programs which drive the operation of manufacturing systems. Hybis is a hierarchical and nonlinear planner whose goal is to obtain partially ordered plans at such a level of detail that they can be use das sequential control programs for manufacturing systems. Currently, those sequential control programs are being generated by hand using modelling tools. This document describes a work whose aim is to improve the efficiency of solving problems with Hybis by using machine learning techniques. It implements a deductive learning method that is able to automatically acquire control knowledge (heuristics) by generating bounded explanations of the problem solving episodes. The learning approach builds on Hamlet, a system that learns control knowledge in the form of control rules.This work was partially supported by a grant from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología through projects TAP1999-0535-C02-02, TIC2001-4936-E, and TIC2002-04146-C05-05.Publicad

Adapting robot task planning to user preferences: an assistive shoe dressing example

The final publication is available at link.springer.comHealthcare robots will be the next big advance in humans’ domestic welfare, with robots able to assist elderly people and users with disabilities. However, each user has his/her own preferences, needs and abilities. Therefore, robotic assistants will need to adapt to them, behaving accordingly. Towards this goal, we propose a method to perform behavior adaptation to the user preferences, using symbolic task planning. A user model is built from the user’s answers to simple questions with a fuzzy inference system, and it is then integrated into the planning domain. We describe an adaptation method based on both the user satisfaction and the execution outcome, depending on which penalizations are applied to the planner’s rules. We demonstrate the application of the adaptation method in a simple shoe-fitting scenario, with experiments performed in a simulated user environment. The results show quick behavior adaptation, even when the user behavior changes, as well as robustness to wrong inference of the initial user model. Finally, some insights in a non-simulated world shoe-fitting setup are also provided.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft