136 research outputs found
Computing Genome Edit Distances using Domain-Independent Planning
The use of planning for computing genome edit distances was suggested by Erdem and Tillier in 2005, but to date there has been no study of how well domain-independent planners are able to solve this problem. This paper reports on experiments with several PDDL formulations of the problem, using several state-of-the-art planners. The main observations are, first, that the problem formulation that is easiest for planners to deal with is not the obvious one, and, second, that plan quality � in particular consistent and assured plan quality � remains the biggest challenge
Numerical Integration and Dynamic Discretization in Heuristic Search Planning over Hybrid Domains
In this paper we look into the problem of planning over hybrid domains, where
change can be both discrete and instantaneous, or continuous over time. In
addition, it is required that each state on the trajectory induced by the
execution of plans complies with a given set of global constraints. We approach
the computation of plans for such domains as the problem of searching over a
deterministic state model. In this model, some of the successor states are
obtained by solving numerically the so-called initial value problem over a set
of ordinary differential equations (ODE) given by the current plan prefix.
These equations hold over time intervals whose duration is determined
dynamically, according to whether zero crossing events take place for a set of
invariant conditions. The resulting planner, FS+, incorporates these features
together with effective heuristic guidance. FS+ does not impose any of the
syntactic restrictions on process effects often found on the existing
literature on Hybrid Planning. A key concept of our approach is that a clear
separation is struck between planning and simulation time steps. The former is
the time allowed to observe the evolution of a given dynamical system before
committing to a future course of action, whilst the later is part of the model
of the environment. FS+ is shown to be a robust planner over a diverse set of
hybrid domains, taken from the existing literature on hybrid planning and
systems.Comment: 17 page
Partial-Order Support-Link Scheduling
Partial-order schedules are valued because they are flexible, and therefore more robust to unexpected delays. Previous work has indicated that constructing partial-order schedules by a two-stage method, in which a fixed-time schedule is first found and
Diagnosis As Planning: Two Case Studies
Diagnosis of discrete event systems amounts to finding good explanations, in the form of system trajectories consistent with a given set of partially ordered observations. This problem is closely related to planning, and in fact can be recast as a classical planning problem. We formulate a PDDL encoding of this diagnosis problem, and use it to evaluate planners representing a variety of planning paradigms on two realistic case studies. Results demonstrate that certain planning techniques have the potential to be very useful in diagnosis, but on the whole, current planners are far from a practical means of solving diagnosis problems
A More General Theory of Diagnosis from First Principles
Model-based diagnosis has been an active research topic in different
communities including artificial intelligence, formal methods, and control.
This has led to a set of disparate approaches addressing different classes of
systems and seeking different forms of diagnoses. In this paper, we resolve
such disparities by generalising Reiter's theory to be agnostic to the types of
systems and diagnoses considered. This more general theory of diagnosis from
first principles defines the minimal diagnosis as the set of preferred
diagnosis candidates in a search space of hypotheses. Computing the minimal
diagnosis is achieved by exploring the space of diagnosis hypotheses, testing
sets of hypotheses for consistency with the system's model and the observation,
and generating conflicts that rule out successors and other portions of the
search space. Under relatively mild assumptions, our algorithms correctly
compute the set of preferred diagnosis candidates. The main difficulty here is
that the search space is no longer a powerset as in Reiter's theory, and that,
as consequence, many of the implicit properties (such as finiteness of the
search space) no longer hold. The notion of conflict also needs to be
generalised and we present such a more general notion. We present two
implementations of these algorithms, using test solvers based on satisfiability
and heuristic search, respectively, which we evaluate on instances from two
real world discrete event problems. Despite the greater generality of our
theory, these implementations surpass the special purpose algorithms designed
for discrete event systems, and enable solving instances that were out of reach
of existing diagnosis approaches
Improving delete relaxation heuristics through explicitly represented conjunctions
Heuristic functions based on the delete relaxation compute upper and lower bounds on the optimal delete-relaxation heuristic h+, and are of paramount importance in both optimal and satisficing planning. Here we introduce a principled and flexible technique for improving h+, by augmenting delete-relaxed planning tasks with a limited amount of delete information. This is done by introducing special fluents that explicitly represent conjunctions of fluents in the original planning task, rendering h+ the perfect heuristic h* in the limit. Previous work has introduced a method in which the growth of the task is potentially exponential in the number of conjunctions introduced. We formulate an alternative technique relying on conditional effects, limiting the growth of the task to be linear in this number. We show that this method still renders h+ the perfect heuristic h* in the limit. We propose techniques to find an informative set of conjunctions to be introduced in different settings, and analyze and extend existing methods for lower-bounding and upper-bounding h + in the presence of conditional effects. We evaluate the resulting heuristic functions empirically on a set of IPC benchmarks, and show that they are sometimes much more informative than standard delete-relaxation heuristics
Incremental Lower Bounds for Additive Cost Planning Problems
We present a novel method for computing increasing lower bounds on the cost of solving planning problems, based on repeatedly solving and strengthening the delete relaxation of the problem. Strengthening is done by compiling select conjunctions into new atoms, similar to the P*m construction. Because it does not rely on search in the state space, this method does not suffer some of the weaknesses of admissible search algorithms and therefore is able to prove higher lower bounds for many problems that are too hard for optimal planners to solve, thus narrowing the gap between lower bound and cost of the best known plan, providing better assurances of plan quality
Dynamic Controllability of Controllable Conditional Temporal Problems with Uncertainty
Dynamic Controllability (DC) of a Simple Temporal Problem
with Uncertainty (STPU) uses a dynamic decision strategy,
rather than a fixed schedule, to tackle temporal uncertainty.
We extend this concept to the Controllable Conditional Temporal Problem with Uncertainty (CCTPU), which extends the STPU by conditioning temporal constraints on the assignment of controllable discrete variables. We define dynamic controllability of a CCTPU as the existence of a strategy that decides on both the values of discrete choice variables and the scheduling of controllable time points dynamically. This contrasts with previous work, which made a static assignment of choice variables and dynamic decisions over time points only. We propose an algorithm to find such a fully dynamic strategy. The algorithm computes the “envelope” of outcomes
of temporal uncertainty in which a particular assignment of
discrete variables is feasible, and aggregates these over all
choices. When an aggregated envelope covers all uncertain
situations of the CCTPU, the problem is dynamically controllable.
However, the algorithm is not complete. Experiments
on an existing set of CCTPU benchmarks show that there are cases in which making both discrete and temporal decisions dynamically it is feasible to satisfy the problem constraints, while assigning the discrete variables statically it is not
Directed unfolding of petri nets
The key to efficient on-the-fly reachability analysis based on unfolding is to focus the expansion of the finite prefix towards the desired marking. However, current unfolding strategies typically equate to blind (breadth-first) search. They do not exploit the knowledge of the marking that is sought, merely entertaining the hope that the road to it will be short. This paper investigates directed unfolding, which exploits problem-specific information in the form of a heuristic function to guide the unfolding towards the desired marking. In the unfolding context, heuristic values are estimates of the distance between configurations. We show that suitable heuristics can be automatically extracted from the original net. We prove that unfolding can rely on heuristic search strategies while preserving the finiteness and completeness of the generated prefix, and in some cases, the optimality of the firing sequence produced. We also establish that the size of the prefix obtained with a useful class of heuristics is never worse than that obtained by blind unfolding. Experimental results demonstrate that directed unfolding scales up to problems that were previously out of reach of the unfolding technique
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