Supporting adaptiveness of cyber-physical processes through action-based formalisms

Cyber Physical Processes (CPPs) refer to a new generation of business processes enacted in many application environments (e.g., emergency management, smart manufacturing, etc.), in which the presence of Internet-of-Things devices and embedded ICT systems (e.g., smartphones, sensors, actuators) strongly influences the coordination of the real-world entities (e.g., humans, robots, etc.) inhabitating such environments. A Process Management System (PMS) employed for executing CPPs is required to automatically adapt its running processes to anomalous situations and exogenous events by minimising any human intervention. In this paper, we tackle this issue by introducing an approach and an adaptive Cognitive PMS, called SmartPM, which combines process execution monitoring, unanticipated exception detection and automated resolution strategies leveraging on three well-established action-based formalisms developed for reasoning about actions in Artificial Intelligence (AI), including the situation calculus, IndiGolog and automated planning. Interestingly, the use of SmartPM does not require any expertise of the internal working of the AI tools involved in the system

SmartPM: An Adaptive Process Management System for Executing Processes in Cyber-Physical Domains

Nowadays, the automation of business processes not only spans classical business domains (e.g., banks and governmental agencies), but also new settings such as healthcare, smart manufacturing, domotics and emergency management [2]. Such domains are characterized by the presence of a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) coordinating heterogeneous ICT components with a large variety of architectures, sensors, actuators, computing and communication capabilities, and involving real world entities that perform complex tasks in the "physical" real world to achieve a common goal. In this context, Process Management Systems (PMSs) are used to manage the life cycle of the processes that coordinate the services offered by the CPS to the real world entities, on the basis of the contextual information collected from the specific cyber-physical domain of interest. The physical world, however, is not entirely predictable. CPSs do not necessarily and always operate in a controlled environment, and their processes must be robust to unexpected conditions and adaptable to exceptions and external exogenous events. In this paper, we tackle the above issue by introducing the SmartPM System (http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/smartpm) an adaptive PMS which combines process execution monitoring, unanticipated exception detection (without requiring an explicit definition of exception handlers), and automated resolution strategies on the basis of well-established Artificial Intelligence techniques, including the Situation Calculus and IndiGolog [1], and classical planning [3]

Indigolog: Execution of guarded action theories

In AI, the problem of selecting (high-level) actions in dynamic and not completely pre-dictable environments translates into the problem of designing controllers that can map sequence of observations into actions so that certain goals are achieved. One approach to high-level controllers is high-level programming. Basically, we imag-ine a system executing a high-level program with respect to a background theory of action. Whereas the background theory describes the characteristics of the domain (ac-tion preconditions, action effects and non-effects, etc.), the high-level program provides strong, but usually incomplete, clues about what the desired sequence of actions should be like. The work presented here combines two recent, but unexplored ideas: Guarded Action Theories and Incremental Program Execution. The result is a new high-level program-ming language, which we call IndiGolog, whose programs, compared with previous lan-guages, are executed in a more practical way with respect to more open-world theories. We provide a theoretical exploration of both guarded theories and program execution, and develop a Prolog implementation for IndiGolog

Rational action in agent programs with prioritized goals

Agent theories and agent programs are two very different styles of specification of agent behavior. The former are declarative in nature, while the latter have an imperative flavor. In this paper, we combine ideas from both areas, yielding a powerful mode of agent specification that also gives the specifier a good deal of control over the complexity of the specified agent. In particular, we extend Shapiro et al.’s [16] agent theory to handle prioritized goals and then integrate it with the IndiGolog agent programming language. The result is a new IndiGolog construct that transforms a given nondeterministic, concurrent program δ into a new program δ ′ that can be described as a rational implementation of the original program, in the sense that δ ′ is an implementation of δ, and furthermore, δ ′ is the most rational of all implementations of δ relative to a given set of prioritized goals and the agent’s knowledge. With this construct, we can specify an agent that will attempt to achieve as many goals as possible in priority order even if the agent does not know of a plan that is guaranteed to achieve all the goals. In this case, the agent will select a plan that she thinks has the best chance of achieving the goals

Università di Roma “La Sapienza” and

When it comes to building controllers for robots or agents, high-level programming languages like Golog and ConGolog offer a useful compromise between planning-based approaches and low-level robot programming. However, two serious problems typically emerge in practical implementations of these languages: how to evaluate tests in a program efficiently enough in an open-world setting, and how to make appropriate nondeterministic choices while avoiding full lookahead. Recent proposals in the literature suggest that one could tackle the first problem by exploiting sensing information, and tackle the second by specifying the amount of lookahead allowed explicitly in the program. In this paper, we combine these two ideas and demonstrate their power by presenting an interpreter, written in Prolog, for a variant of Golog that is suitable for efficiently operating in open-world setting by exploiting sensing and bounded lookahead

Multi-Tier Automated Planning for Adaptive Behavior

A planning domain, as any model, is never “complete” and inevitably makes assumptions on the environment's dynamic. By allowing the specification of just one domain model, the knowledge engineer is only able to make one set of assumptions, and to specify a single objective-goal. Borrowing from work in Software Engineering, we propose a multi-tier framework for planning that allows the specification of different sets of assumptions, and of different corresponding objectives. The framework aims to support the synthesis of adaptive behavior so as to mitigate the intrinsic risk in any planning modeling task. After defining the multi-tier planning task and its solution concept, we show how to solve problem instances by a succinct compilation to a form of non-deterministic planning. In doing so, our technique justifies the applicability of planning with both fair and unfair actions, and the need for more efforts in developing planning systems supporting dual fairness assumptions

Compositional Supervisory Control via Reactive Synthesis and Automated Planning

We show how reactive synthesis and automated planning can be leveraged effectively to find nonmaximal solutions to deterministic supervisory control problems of discrete event systems. To do so, we propose efficient translations of the supervisory control problem into the reactive synthesis and planning frameworks. Notably, our translation methods capture the compositional and reactive nature of control specifications, avoiding a potential exponential explosion found in alternative translation approaches. Additionally, we report on experimental results comparing the efficacy of different tools from the three disciplines, for a particular supervisory control benchmark.Fil: Ciolek, Daniel Alfredo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: Braberman, Victor Adrian. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: D'ippolito, Nicolás Roque. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: Uchitel, Sebastian. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: Sardiña, Sebastian. Royal Melbourne Institute Of Technology.; Australi