The reality of design process planning

Most companies struggle with the efficiency of their processes. One contributory factor is the lack of efficient process planning. This paper describes current planning practise in industry, which uses a multitude of different plans in parallel. The units of planning and their resulting plans roughly fall into product plans considering cost, bill of material and procurement considerations; process plans including different milestone, task and activity plans and quality plans. This paper maps out the ownership of these plans, and establishes that organisations work because individuals use more then one plan and have a tacit understanding of the relationships between these plans. The lack of effective plans affects the company through a lack of understanding of process connectivity and in consequence bad communication

Stacked Thompson Bandits

We introduce Stacked Thompson Bandits (STB) for efficiently generating plans that are likely to satisfy a given bounded temporal logic requirement. STB uses a simulation for evaluation of plans, and takes a Bayesian approach to using the resulting information to guide its search. In particular, we show that stacking multiarmed bandits and using Thompson sampling to guide the action selection process for each bandit enables STB to generate plans that satisfy requirements with a high probability while only searching a fraction of the search space.Comment: Accepted at SEsCPS @ ICSE 201

A Statistical Analysis of Defined Benefit, Defined Contribution, and Hybrid Plans

The purpose of this study is to compare three major types of employer sponsored retirement plans, Defined Benefit (DB), Defined Contribution (DC), and hybrid, and their impact on the employee. Employee careers are simulated to understand the employee’s advantages and disadvantages of each type of plan, especially in the state of an economic depression. The study uses actuarial assumptions and the simulation varies a number of quantities to better understand the impact of employee savings. The variables which are simulated at different levels are: service start age, retirement age, current compensation, salary increase rate, rate of return on market investments, mortality rates, and interest rate. The simulation shows that traditional defined benefit plans typically give employees a higher benefit than both defined contribution and hybrid plans. Additionally, defined benefit plans are not subject to the market risk of many of the other retirement plan types. Finally, typical employees change plans at least once during their career and this has a significant negative effect on their retirement benefits

Planning with Incomplete Information

Planning is a natural domain of application for frameworks of reasoning about actions and change. In this paper we study how one such framework, the Language E, can form the basis for planning under (possibly) incomplete information. We define two types of plans: weak and safe plans, and propose a planner, called the E-Planner, which is often able to extend an initial weak plan into a safe plan even though the (explicit) information available is incomplete, e.g. for cases where the initial state is not completely known. The E-Planner is based upon a reformulation of the Language E in argumentation terms and a natural proof theory resulting from the reformulation. It uses an extension of this proof theory by means of abduction for the generation of plans and adopts argumentation-based techniques for extending weak plans into safe plans. We provide representative examples illustrating the behaviour of the E-Planner, in particular for cases where the status of fluents is incompletely known.Comment: Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning, April 9-11, 2000, Breckenridge, Colorad

The Odyssey Approach for Optimizing Federated SPARQL Queries

Answering queries over a federation of SPARQL endpoints requires combining data from more than one data source. Optimizing queries in such scenarios is particularly challenging not only because of (i) the large variety of possible query execution plans that correctly answer the query but also because (ii) there is only limited access to statistics about schema and instance data of remote sources. To overcome these challenges, most federated query engines rely on heuristics to reduce the space of possible query execution plans or on dynamic programming strategies to produce optimal plans. Nevertheless, these plans may still exhibit a high number of intermediate results or high execution times because of heuristics and inaccurate cost estimations. In this paper, we present Odyssey, an approach that uses statistics that allow for a more accurate cost estimation for federated queries and therefore enables Odyssey to produce better query execution plans. Our experimental results show that Odyssey produces query execution plans that are better in terms of data transfer and execution time than state-of-the-art optimizers. Our experiments using the FedBench benchmark show execution time gains of at least 25 times on average.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figure

Learning Features and Abstract Actions for Computing Generalized Plans

Generalized planning is concerned with the computation of plans that solve not one but multiple instances of a planning domain. Recently, it has been shown that generalized plans can be expressed as mappings of feature values into actions, and that they can often be computed with fully observable non-deterministic (FOND) planners. The actions in such plans, however, are not the actions in the instances themselves, which are not necessarily common to other instances, but abstract actions that are defined on a set of common features. The formulation assumes that the features and the abstract actions are given. In this work, we address this limitation by showing how to learn them automatically. The resulting account of generalized planning combines learning and planning in a novel way: a learner, based on a Max SAT formulation, yields the features and abstract actions from sampled state transitions, and a FOND planner uses this information, suitably transformed, to produce the general plans. Correctness guarantees are given and experimental results on several domains are reported.Comment: Preprint of paper accepted at AAAI'19 conferenc

Plans for Kaon Physics at BNL

I give an overview of current plans for kaon physics at BNL. The program is centered on the rare decay modes K+ --> pi+ nu nubar and KL --> pi0 nu nubar.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures. Uses espcrc2.sty. For the proceedings of HIF04: High Intensity Frontier Workshop, La Biodola, Isola D'Elba, June 5-8, 200