47 research outputs found
Oversubscription Planning as Classical Planning with Multiple Cost Functions
The aim of classical planning is to minimize the summed cost of operators among those plans that achieve a fixed set of goals. Oversubscription planning (OSP), on the other hand, seeks to maximize the utility of the set of facts achieved by a plan, while keeping the cost of the plan at or below some specified bound. Here, we investigate the use of reformulations that yield planning problems with two separate cost functions, but no utilities, for solving OSP tasks. Such reformulations have also been proposed in the context of net-benefit planning, where the planner tries to maximize the difference between the utility achieved and the cost of the plan. One of our reformulations is adapted directly from that setting, while the other is novel. In both cases, they allow for easy adaptation of existing classical planning heuristics to the OSP problem within a simple branch and bound search. We validate our approach using state of the art admissible heuristics in this framework, and report our results
Using the relaxed plan heuristic to select goals in oversubscription planning problems
Oversubscription planning (OSP) appears in many
real problems where nding a plan achieving all goals is infeasi-
ble. The objective is to nd a feasible plan reaching a goal sub-
set while maximizing some measure of utility. In this paper, we
present a new technique to select goals \a priori" for problems in
which a cost bound prevents all the goals from being achieved.
It uses estimations of distances between goals, which are com-
puted using relaxed plans. Using these distances, a search in
the space of subsets of goals is performed, yielding a new set of
goals to plan for. A revised planning problem can be created and
solved, taking into account only the selected goals. We present
experiments in six di erent domains with good results.This work has been partially supported by MICIIN TIN2008-06701-C03-03 and
CCG10-UC3M/TIC-5597 projects.Publicad
Goal reasoning for autonomous agents using automated planning
MenciĂłn Internacional en el tĂtulo de doctorAutomated planning deals with the task of finding a sequence of actions, namely
a plan, which achieves a goal from a given initial state. Most planning research
consider goals are provided by a external user, and agents just have to find a
plan to achieve them. However, there exist many real world domains where
agents should not only reason about their actions but also about their goals,
generating new ones or changing them according to the perceived environment.
In this thesis we aim at broadening the goal reasoning capabilities of planningbased
agents, both when acting in isolation and when operating in the same
environment as other agents.
In single-agent settings, we firstly explore a special type of planning tasks
where we aim at discovering states that fulfill certain cost-based requirements
with respect to a given set of goals. By computing these states, agents are able
to solve interesting tasks such as find escape plans that move agents in to safe
places, hide their true goal to a potential observer, or anticipate dynamically arriving
goals. We also show how learning the environmentâs dynamics may help
agents to solve some of these tasks. Experimental results show that these states
can be quickly found in practice, making agents able to solve new planning
tasks and helping them in solving some existing ones.
In multi-agent settings, we study the automated generation of goals based on
other agentsâ behavior. We focus on competitive scenarios, where we are interested
in computing counterplans that prevent opponents from achieving their
goals. We frame these tasks as counterplanning, providing theoretical properties
of the counterplans that solve them. We also show how agents can benefit
from computing some of the states we propose in the single-agent setting to
anticipate their opponentâs movements, thus increasing the odds of blocking
them. Experimental results show how counterplans can be found in different
environments ranging from competitive planning domains to real-time strategy
games.Programa de Doctorado en Ciencia y TecnologĂa InformĂĄtica por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidenta: Eva OnaindĂa de la Rivaherrera.- Secretario: Ăngel GarcĂa Olaya.- Vocal: Mark Robert
Goal Reasoning: Papers from the ACS workshop
This technical report contains the 11 accepted papers presented at the Workshop on Goal Reasoning,
which was held as part of the 2013 Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS-13) in
Baltimore, Maryland on 14 December 2013. This is the third in a series of workshops related to this
topic, the first of which was the AAAI-10 Workshop on Goal-Directed Autonomy while the second was
the Self-Motivated Agents (SeMoA) Workshop, held at Lehigh University in November 2012.
Our objective for holding this meeting was to encourage researchers to share information on the study,
development, integration, evaluation, and application of techniques related to goal reasoning, which
concerns the ability of an intelligent agent to reason about, formulate, select, and manage its
goals/objectives. Goal reasoning differs from frameworks in which agents are told what goals to
achieve, and possibly how goals can be decomposed into subgoals, but not how to dynamically and
autonomously decide what goals they should pursue. This constraint can be limiting for agents that solve
tasks in complex environments when it is not feasible to manually engineer/encode complete knowledge
of what goal(s) should be pursued for every conceivable state. Yet, in such environments, states can be
reached in which actions can fail, opportunities can arise, and events can otherwise take place that
strongly motivate changing the goal(s) that the agent is currently trying to achieve.
This topic is not new; researchers in several areas have studied goal reasoning (e.g., in the context of
cognitive architectures, automated planning, game AI, and robotics). However, it has infrequently been
the focus of intensive study, and (to our knowledge) no other series of meetings has focused specifically
on goal reasoning. As shown in these papers, providing an agent with the ability to reason about its goals
can increase performance measures for some tasks. Recent advances in hardware and software platforms
(involving the availability of interesting/complex simulators or databases) have increasingly permitted
the application of intelligent agents to tasks that involve partially observable and dynamically-updated
states (e.g., due to unpredictable exogenous events), stochastic actions, multiple (cooperating, neutral, or
adversarial) agents, and other complexities. Thus, this is an appropriate time to foster dialogue among
researchers with interests in goal reasoning.
Research on goal reasoning is still in its early stages; no mature application of it yet exists (e.g., for
controlling autonomous unmanned vehicles or in a deployed decision aid). However, it appears to have a
bright future. For example, leaders in the automated planning community have specifically
acknowledged that goal reasoning has a prominent role among intelligent agents that act on their own
plans, and it is gathering increasing attention from roboticists and cognitive systems researchers.
In addition to a survey, the papers in this workshop relate to, among other topics, cognitive architectures
and models, environment modeling, game AI, machine learning, meta-reasoning, planning, selfmotivated
systems, simulation, and vehicle control. The authors discuss a wide range of issues
pertaining to goal reasoning, including representations and reasoning methods for dynamically revising
goal priorities. We hope that readers will find that this theme for enhancing agent autonomy to be
appealing and relevant to their own interests, and that these papers will spur further investigations on
this important yet (mostly) understudied topic
Conflict-driven learning in AI planning state-space search
Many combinatorial computation problems in computer science can be cast as a reachability problem in an implicitly described, potentially huge, graph: the state space. State-space search is a versatile and widespread method to solve such reachability problems, but it requires some form of guidance to prevent exploring that combinatorial space exhaustively. Conflict-driven learning is an indispensable search ingredient for solving constraint satisfaction problems (most prominently, Boolean satisfiability). It guides search towards solutions by identifying conflicts during the search, i.e., search branches not leading to any solution, learning from them knowledge to avoid similar conflicts in the remainder of the search. This thesis adapts the conflict-driven learning methodology to more general classes of reachability problems. Specifically, our work is placed in AI planning. We consider goal-reachability objectives in classical planning and in planning under uncertainty. The canonical form of "conflicts" in this context are dead-end states, i.e., states from which the desired goal property cannot be reached. We pioneer methods for learning sound and generalizable dead-end knowledge from conflicts encountered during forward state-space search. This embraces the following core contributions: When acting under uncertainty, the presence of dead-end states may make it impossible to satisfy the goal property with absolute certainty. The natural planning objective then is MaxProb, maximizing the probability of reaching the goal. However, algorithms for MaxProb probabilistic planning are severely underexplored. We close this gap by developing a large design space of probabilistic state-space search methods, contributing new search algorithms, admissible state-space reduction techniques, and goal-probability bounds suitable for heuristic state-space search. We systematically explore this design space through an extensive empirical evaluation. The key to our conflict-driven learning algorithm adaptation are unsolvability detectors, i.e., goal-reachability overapproximations. We design three complementary families of such unsolvability detectors, building upon known techniques: critical-path heuristics, linear-programming-based heuristics, and dead-end traps. We develop search methods to identify conflicts in deterministic and probabilistic state spaces, and we develop suitable refinement methods for the different unsolvability detectors so to recognize these states. Arranged in a depth-first search, our techniques approach the elegance of conflict-driven learning in constraint satisfaction, featuring the ability to learn to refute search subtrees, and intelligent backjumping to the root cause of a conflict. We provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation, demonstrating that the proposed techniques yield state-of-the-art performance for finding plans for solvable classical planning tasks, proving classical planning tasks unsolvable, and solving MaxProb in probabilistic planning, on benchmarks where dead-end states abound.Viele kombinatorisch komplexe Berechnungsprobleme in der Informatik lassen sich als Erreichbarkeitsprobleme in einem implizit dargestellten, potenziell riesigen, Graphen - dem Zustandsraum - verstehen. Die Zustandsraumsuche ist eine weit verbreitete Methode, um solche Erreichbarkeitsprobleme zu lösen. Die Effizienz dieser Methode hĂ€ngt aber maĂgeblich von der Verwendung strikter Suchkontrollmechanismen ab. Das konfliktgesteuerte Lernen ist eine essenzielle Suchkomponente fĂŒr das Lösen von Constraint-Satisfaction-Problemen (wie dem ErfĂŒllbarkeitsproblem der Aussagenlogik), welches von Konflikten, also Fehlern in der Suche, neue Kontrollregeln lernt, die Ă€hnliche Konflikte zukĂŒnftig vermeiden. In dieser Arbeit erweitern wir die zugrundeliegende Methodik auf Zielerreichbarkeitsfragen, wie sie im klassischen und probabilistischen Planen, einem Teilbereich der KĂŒnstlichen Intelligenz, auftauchen. Die kanonische Form von âKonfliktenâ in diesem Kontext sind sog. Sackgassen, ZustĂ€nde, von denen aus die Zielbedingung nicht erreicht werden kann. Wir prĂ€sentieren Methoden, die es ermöglichen, wĂ€hrend der Zustandsraumsuche von solchen Konflikten korrektes und verallgemeinerbares Wissen ĂŒber Sackgassen zu erlernen. Unsere Arbeit umfasst folgende BeitrĂ€ge: Wenn der Effekt des Handelns mit Unsicherheiten behaftet ist, dann kann die Existenz von Sackgassen dazu fĂŒhren, dass die Zielbedingung nicht unter allen UmstĂ€nden erfĂŒllt werden kann. Die naheliegendste Planungsbedingung in diesem Fall ist MaxProb, das Maximieren der Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass die Zielbedingung erreicht wird. Planungsalgorithmen fĂŒr MaxProb sind jedoch wenig erforscht. Um diese LĂŒcke zu schlieĂen, erstellen wir einen umfangreichen Bausatz fĂŒr Suchmethoden in probabilistischen ZustandsrĂ€umen, und entwickeln dabei neue Suchalgorithmen, Zustandsraumreduktionsmethoden, und AbschĂ€tzungen der Zielerreichbarkeitswahrscheinlichkeit, wie sie fĂŒr heuristische Suchalgorithmen gebraucht werden. Wir explorieren den resultierenden Gestaltungsraum systematisch in einer breit angelegten empirischen Studie. Die Grundlage unserer Adaption des konfliktgesteuerten Lernens bilden Unerreichbarkeitsdetektoren. Wir konzipieren drei Familien solcher Detektoren basierend auf bereits bekannten Techniken: Kritische-Pfad Heuristiken, Heuristiken basierend auf linearer Optimierung, und Sackgassen-Fallen. Wir entwickeln Suchmethoden, um Konflikte in deterministischen und probabilistischen ZustandsrĂ€umen zu erkennen, sowie Methoden, um die verschiedenen Unerreichbarkeitsdetektoren basierend auf den erkannten Konflikten zu verfeinern. Instanziiert als Tiefensuche weisen unsere Techniken Ă€hnliche Eigenschaften auf wie das konfliktgesteuerte Lernen fĂŒr Constraint-Satisfaction-Problemen. Wir evaluieren die entwickelten Methoden empirisch, und zeigen dabei, dass das konfliktgesteuerte Lernen unter gewissen Voraussetzungen zu signifikanten Suchreduktionen beim Finden von PlĂ€nen in lösbaren klassischen Planungsproblemen, Beweisen der Unlösbarkeit von klassischen Planungsproblemen, und Lösen von MaxProb im probabilistischen Planen, fĂŒhren kann