The Difficulty of Novelty Detection in Open-World Physical Domains: An Application to Angry Birds

Detecting and responding to novel situations in open-world environments is a key capability of human cognition. Current artificial intelligence (AI) researchers strive to develop systems that can perform in open-world environments. Novelty detection is an important ability of such AI systems. In an open-world, novelties appear in various forms and the difficulty to detect them varies. Therefore, to accurately evaluate the detection capability of AI systems, it is necessary to investigate the difficulty to detect novelties. In this paper, we propose a qualitative physics-based method to quantify the difficulty of novelty detection focusing on open-world physical domains. We apply our method in a popular physics simulation game, Angry Birds. We conduct an experiment with human players with different novelties in Angry Birds to validate our method. Results indicate that the calculated difficulty values are in line with the detection difficulty of the human players

A simulation framework for a real-time demand responsive public transit system

Transit systems have encountered a radical change in the recent past as a result of the digital disruption. Consequently, traditional public transit systems no longer satisfy the diversified demands of passengers and hence, have been complemented by demand responsive transit solutions. However, we identify a lack of simulation tools developed to test and validate complex scenarios for real-time demand responsive public transit. Thus, in this paper, we propose a simulation framework, which combines complex scenario creation, optimization algorithm execution and result visualization using SUMO, an open source continuous simulator. In comparison to a state-of-the-art work, the proposed tool supports features such as varying vehicle capacity and driving range, immediate and advance passenger requests and maximum travel time constraints. Further, the framework follows a modular architecture that allows plug-and-play support for external modules