144,533 research outputs found
On-line planning and scheduling: an application to controlling modular printers
We present a case study of artificial intelligence techniques applied to the control of production printing equipment. Like many other real-world applications, this complex domain requires high-speed autonomous decision-making and robust continual operation. To our knowledge, this work represents the first successful industrial application of embedded domain-independent temporal planning. Our system handles execution failures and multi-objective preferences. At its heart is an on-line algorithm that combines techniques from state-space planning and partial-order scheduling. We suggest that this general architecture may prove useful in other applications as more intelligent systems operate in continual, on-line settings. Our system has been used to drive several commercial prototypes and has enabled a new product architecture for our industrial partner. When compared with state-of-the-art off-line planners, our system is hundreds of times faster and often finds better plans. Our experience demonstrates that domain-independent AI planning based on heuristic search can flexibly handle time, resources, replanning, and multiple objectives in a high-speed practical application without requiring hand-coded control knowledge
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
Learning and Management for Internet-of-Things: Accounting for Adaptivity and Scalability
Internet-of-Things (IoT) envisions an intelligent infrastructure of networked
smart devices offering task-specific monitoring and control services. The
unique features of IoT include extreme heterogeneity, massive number of
devices, and unpredictable dynamics partially due to human interaction. These
call for foundational innovations in network design and management. Ideally, it
should allow efficient adaptation to changing environments, and low-cost
implementation scalable to massive number of devices, subject to stringent
latency constraints. To this end, the overarching goal of this paper is to
outline a unified framework for online learning and management policies in IoT
through joint advances in communication, networking, learning, and
optimization. From the network architecture vantage point, the unified
framework leverages a promising fog architecture that enables smart devices to
have proximity access to cloud functionalities at the network edge, along the
cloud-to-things continuum. From the algorithmic perspective, key innovations
target online approaches adaptive to different degrees of nonstationarity in
IoT dynamics, and their scalable model-free implementation under limited
feedback that motivates blind or bandit approaches. The proposed framework
aspires to offer a stepping stone that leads to systematic designs and analysis
of task-specific learning and management schemes for IoT, along with a host of
new research directions to build on.Comment: Submitted on June 15 to Proceeding of IEEE Special Issue on Adaptive
and Scalable Communication Network
Noise-Adaptive Compiler Mappings for Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Computers
A massive gap exists between current quantum computing (QC) prototypes, and
the size and scale required for many proposed QC algorithms. Current QC
implementations are prone to noise and variability which affect their
reliability, and yet with less than 80 quantum bits (qubits) total, they are
too resource-constrained to implement error correction. The term Noisy
Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) refers to these current and near-term systems
of 1000 qubits or less. Given NISQ's severe resource constraints, low
reliability, and high variability in physical characteristics such as coherence
time or error rates, it is of pressing importance to map computations onto them
in ways that use resources efficiently and maximize the likelihood of
successful runs.
This paper proposes and evaluates backend compiler approaches to map and
optimize high-level QC programs to execute with high reliability on NISQ
systems with diverse hardware characteristics. Our techniques all start from an
LLVM intermediate representation of the quantum program (such as would be
generated from high-level QC languages like Scaffold) and generate QC
executables runnable on the IBM Q public QC machine. We then use this framework
to implement and evaluate several optimal and heuristic mapping methods. These
methods vary in how they account for the availability of dynamic machine
calibration data, the relative importance of various noise parameters, the
different possible routing strategies, and the relative importance of
compile-time scalability versus runtime success. Using real-system
measurements, we show that fine grained spatial and temporal variations in
hardware parameters can be exploited to obtain an average x (and up to
x) improvement in program success rate over the industry standard IBM
Qiskit compiler.Comment: To appear in ASPLOS'1
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