Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories: Marginalizing Out Future Passengers in Group Elevator Control

Despite being in existence for over a century, modern elevators have an underlying problem that is anything but easy to solve. When multiple elevators are being used in a single location, it quickly becomes a daunting task to create an intelligent control system that optimally meets the needs of its users. This paper, which will be presented at the 2003 Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence in August, proposes an algorithm that attempts to model the waiting time of passengers at the lobby. An excellent problem formulation is outlined, effectively demonstrating how computationally intensive the task of controlling an elevator can truly be. Many other papers can be freely downloaded from the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories Web site

Decision-Theoretic Planning for User-Adaptive Systems: Dealing With Multiple Goals and Resource Limitations

While there exists a number of user-adaptive systems that use decision-theoretic methods to make individual decisions, decision-theoretic planning has hardly been exploited in the context of useradaptive systems so far. This thesis focuses on the application of decision-theoretic planning in user-adaptive systems and demonstrates how competing goals and resource limitations of the user can be considered in such an approach. The approach is illustrated with examples from the following domains: user-adaptive assistance for operating a technical device, user-adaptive navigation recommendations in an airport scenario, and finally user-adaptive and location-aware shopping assistance. With the shopping assistant, we have analyzed usability issues of a system based on decision-theoretic planning in two user studies. We describe how hard time constraints, as they are induced, for example, by the boarding of the passenger in an airport navigation scenario, can be considered in a decision-theoretic approach. Moreover, we propose a hierarchical decision-theoretic planning approach based on goal priorization, which keeps the complexity of dealing with realistic problems tractable. Furthermore, we specify the general workflow for the development and application of Markov decision processes to be applied in user-adaptive systems, and we describe possibilities to enhance a user-adaptive system based on decision-theoretic planning by an explanation component