Planning through Automatic Portfolio Configuration: The PbP Approach

In the field of domain-independent planning, several powerful planners implementing different techniques have been developed. However, no one of these systems outperforms all others in every known benchmark domain. In this work, we propose a multi-planner approach that automatically configures a portfolio of planning techniques for each given domain. The configuration process for a given domain uses a set of training instances to: (i) compute and analyze some alternative sets of macro-actions for each planner in the portfolio identifying a (possibly empty) useful set, (ii) select a cluster of planners, each one with the identified useful set of macro-actions, that is expected to perform best, and (iii) derive some additional information for configuring the execution scheduling of the selected planners at planning time. The resulting planning system, called PbP (Portfolio- based Planner), has two variants focusing on speed and plan quality. Different versions of PbP entered and won the learning track of the sixth and seventh International Planning Competitions. In this paper, we experimentally analyze PbP considering planning speed and plan quality in depth. We provide a collection of results that help to understand PbP�s behavior, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to configuring a portfolio of planners with macro-actions

Identifying and Exploiting Features for Effective Plan Retrieval in Case-Based Planning

Case-Based planning can fruitfully exploit knowledge gained by solving a large number of problems, storing the corresponding solutions in a plan library and reusing them for solving similar planning problems in the future. Case-based planning is extremely effective when similar reuse candidates can be efficiently chosen. In this paper, we study an innovative technique based on planning problem features for efficiently retrieving solved planning problems (and relative plans) from large plan libraries. A problem feature is a characteristic of the instance that can be automatically derived from the problem specification, domain and search space analyses, and different problem encodings. Since the use of existing planning features are not always able to effectively distinguish between problems within the same planning domain, we introduce a new class of features. An experimental analysis in this paper shows that our features-based retrieval approach can significantly improve the performance of a state-of-the-art case-based planning system

Portfolio Methods for Optimal Planning: an Empirical Analysis

Combining the complementary strengths of several algorithms through portfolio approaches has been demonstrated to be effective in solving a wide range of AI problems. Notably, portfolio techniques have been prominently applied to suboptimal (satisficing) AI planning. Here, we consider the construction of sequential planner portfolios for (domain- independent) optimal planning. Specifically, we introduce four techniques (three of which are dynamic) for per-instance planner schedule generation using problem instance features, and investigate the usefulness of a range of static and dynamic techniques for combining planners. Our extensive experimental analysis demonstrates the benefits of using static and dynamic sequential portfolios for optimal planning, and provides insights on the most suitable conditions for their fruitful exploitation

A Comparison of Natural Language Understanding Services to build a chatbot in Italian

All leading IT companies have developed cloud-based platforms that allow building a chatbot in few steps and most times without knowledge about programming languages. These services are based on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engines which deal with identifying information such as entities and intents from the sentences provided as input. In order to integrate a chatbot on an e-learning platform, we want to study the performance in intent recognition task of major NLU platforms available on the market through a deep and severe comparison, using an Italian dataset which is provided by the owner of the e-learning platform. We focused on the intent recognition task because we believe that it is the core part of an efficient chatbot, which is able to operate in a complex context with thousands of users who have different language skills. We carried out different experiments and collected performance information about F-score, error rate, response time and robustness of all selected NLU platforms

Efficient Algorithms for Qualitative Reasoning about Time

AbstractReasoning about temporal information is an important task in many areas of Artificial Intelligence. In this paper we address the problem of scalability in temporal reasoning by providing a collection of new algorithms for efficiently managing large sets of qualitative temporal relations. We focus on the class of relations forming the Point Algebra (PA-relations) and on a major extension to include binary disjunctions of PA-relations (PA-disjunctions). Such disjunctions add a great deal of expressive power, including the ability to stipulate disjointness of temporal intervals, which is important in planning applications.Our representation of time is based on timegraphs, graphs partitioned into a set of chains on which the search is supported by a metagraph data structure. The approach is an extension of the time representation proposed by Schubert, Taugher and Miller in the context of story comprehension. The algorithms herein enable construction of a timegraph from a given set of PA-relations, querying a timegraph, and efficiently checking the consistency of a timegraph augmented by a set of PA-disjunctions. Experimental results illustrate the efficiency of the proposed approach

Preferences and Soft Constraints in PDDL3

The notion of plan quality in automated planning is a practically very important issue. In many real-world planning domains, we have to address problems with a large set of solutions, or with a set of goals that cannot all be achieved. In these problems, it is important to generate plans of good or optimal quality achieving all problem goals (if possible) or some subset of them. In the previous International planning competitions, the plan generation CPU-time played a central role in the evaluation of the competing planners. In the fifth International planning competition (IPC-5), while considering the CPU-time, we would like to give greater emphasis to the importance of plan quality. The versions of PDDL used in the previous two competitions (PDDL2.1 and PDDL2.2) allow us to express some criteria for plan quality, such as the number of plan actions or parallel steps, and relatively complex plan metrics involving plan makes pan and numerical quantities. These are powerful and expressive in domains that include metric fluents, but plan quality can still only be measured by plan size in the case of propositional planning. We believe that these criteria are insufficient, and we propose to extend PDDL with new constructs increasing its expressive power about the plan quality specification