PDDL2.1: An extension of PDDL for expressing temporal planning domains

In recent years research in the planning community has moved increasingly towards application of planners to realistic problems involving both time and many types of resources. For example, interest in planning demonstrated by the space research community has inspired work in observation scheduling, planetary rover ex ploration and spacecraft control domains. Other temporal and resource-intensive domains including logistics planning, plant control and manufacturing have also helped to focus the community on the modelling and reasoning issues that must be confronted to make planning technology meet the challenges of application. The International Planning Competitions have acted as an important motivating force behind the progress that has been made in planning since 1998. The third competition (held in 2002) set the planning community the challenge of handling time and numeric resources. This necessitated the development of a modelling language capable of expressing temporal and numeric properties of planning domains. In this paper we describe the language, PDDL2.1, that was used in the competition. We describe the syntax of the language, its formal semantics and the validation of concurrent plans. We observe that PDDL2.1 has considerable modelling power --- exceeding the capabilities of current planning technology --- and presents a number of important challenges to the research community

Specification and Verification of Commitment-Regulated Data-Aware Multiagent Systems

In this paper we investigate multi agent systems whose agent interaction is based on social commitments that evolve over time, in presence of (possibly incomplete) data. In particular, we are interested in modeling and verifying how data maintained by the agents impact on the dynamics of such systems, and on the evolution of their commitments. This requires to lift the commitment-related conditions studied in the literature, which are typically based on propositional logics, to a first-order setting. To this purpose, we propose a rich framework for modeling data-aware commitment-based multiagent systems. In this framework, we study verification of rich temporal properties, establishing its decidability under the condition of “state-boundedness”, i.e., data items come from an infinite domain but, at every time point, each agent can store only a bounded number of them

Complex Actions for Event Processing

Automatic reactions triggered by complex events have been deployed with great success in particular domains, among others, in algorithmic trading, the automatic reaction to realtime analysis of marked data. However, to date, reactions in complex event processing systems are often still limited to mere modifications of internal databases or are realized by means similar to remote procedure calls. In this paper, we argue that expressive complex actions with support for composite work ows and integration of so called external actions are desirable for a wide range of real-world applications among other emergency management. This article investigates the particularities of external actions needed in emergency management, which are initiated inside the event processing system but which are actually executed by external actuators, and discuss the implications of these particularities on composite actions. Based on these observations, we propose versatile complex actions with temporal dependencies and a seamless integration of complex events and external actions. This article also investigates how the proposed integrated approach towards complex events and complex actions can be evaluated based on simple reactive rules. Finally, it is shown how complex actions can be deployed for a complex event processing system devoted to emergency management