41,936 research outputs found
PDDL2.1: An extension of PDDL for expressing temporal planning domains
In recent years research in the planning community has moved increasingly towards application of planners to realistic problems involving both time and many types of resources. For example, interest in planning demonstrated by the space research community has inspired work in observation scheduling, planetary rover ex ploration and spacecraft control domains. Other temporal and resource-intensive domains including logistics planning, plant control and manufacturing have also helped to focus the community on the modelling and reasoning issues that must be confronted to make planning technology meet the challenges of application. The International Planning Competitions have acted as an important motivating force behind the progress that has been made in planning since 1998. The third competition (held in 2002) set the planning community the challenge of handling time and numeric resources. This necessitated the development of a modelling language capable of expressing temporal and numeric properties of planning domains. In this paper we describe the language, PDDL2.1, that was used in the competition. We describe the syntax of the language, its formal semantics and the validation of concurrent plans. We observe that PDDL2.1 has considerable modelling power --- exceeding the capabilities of current planning technology --- and presents a number of important challenges to the research community
The Automatic Inference of State Invariants in TIM
As planning is applied to larger and richer domains the effort involved in
constructing domain descriptions increases and becomes a significant burden on
the human application designer. If general planners are to be applied
successfully to large and complex domains it is necessary to provide the domain
designer with some assistance in building correctly encoded domains. One way of
doing this is to provide domain-independent techniques for extracting, from a
domain description, knowledge that is implicit in that description and that can
assist domain designers in debugging domain descriptions. This knowledge can
also be exploited to improve the performance of planners: several researchers
have explored the potential of state invariants in speeding up the performance
of domain-independent planners. In this paper we describe a process by which
state invariants can be extracted from the automatically inferred type
structure of a domain. These techniques are being developed for exploitation by
STAN, a Graphplan based planner that employs state analysis techniques to
enhance its performance
Extending the exploitation of symmetries in planning
Highly symmetric problems result in redundant search effort which can render apparently simple problems intractable. Whilst the potential benefits of symmetry-breaking have been explored in the broader search community there has been relatively little interest in the exploitation of this potential in planning. An initial exploration of the benefits of symmetry-breaking in a Graphplan framework, by Fox and Long in 1999 (Fox and Long 1999) yielded promising results but failed to take into account the importance of identifying and exploiting new symmetries that arise during the search process. In this paper we extend the symmetry exploitation ideas described in (Fox and Long 1999) to handle new symmetries and report results obtained from a range of planning problems
Plan permutation symmetries as a source of inefficiency in planning
This paper briefly reviews sources of symmetry in planning and highlights one source that has not previously been tackled: plan permutation symmetry. Symmetries can be a significant problem for efficiency of planning systems, as has been previously observed in the treatment of other forms of symmetry in planning problems. We examine how plan permutation symmetries can be eliminated and present evidence to support the claim that these symmetries are an important problem for planning systems
Exploiting a graphplan framework in temporal planning
Graphplan (Blum and Furst 1995) has proved a popular and successful basis for a succession of extensions. An extension to handle temporal planning is a natural one to consider, because of the seductively time-like structure of the layers in the plan graph. TGP (Smith and Weld 1999) and TPSys (Garrido, Onaindía, and Barber 2001; Garrido, Fox, and Long 2002) are both examples of temporal planners that have exploited the Graphplan foundation. However, both of these systems (including both versions of TPSys) exploit the graph to represent a uniform flow of time. In this paper we describe an alternative approach, in which the graph is used to represent the purely logical structuring of the plan, with temporal constraints being managed separately (although not independently). The approach uses a linear constraint solver to ensure that temporal durations are correctly respected. The resulting planner offers an interesting alternative to the other approaches, offering an important extension in expressive power
Progress in AI Planning Research and Applications
Planning has made significant progress since its inception in the 1970s, in terms both of the efficiency and sophistication of its algorithms and representations and its potential for application to real problems. In this paper we sketch the foundations of planning as a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence and the history of its development over the past three decades. Then some of the recent achievements within the field are discussed and provided some experimental data demonstrating the progress that has been made in the application of general planners to realistic and complex problems. The paper concludes by identifying some of the open issues that remain as important challenges for future research in planning
Planning with generic types
Domain-independent, or knowledge-sparse, planning has limited practical appli-cation because of the failure of brute-force search to scale to address real prob-lems. However, requiring a domain engineer to take responsibility for directing the search behavior of a planner entails a heavy burden of representation and leads to systems that have no general application. An interesting compromise is to use domain analysis techniques to extract features from a domain description that can exploited to good effect by a planner. In this chapter we discuss the process by which generic patterns of behavior can be recognized in a domain, by automatic techniques, and appropriate specialized technologies recruited to assist a planner in efficient problem solving in that domain. We describe the in-tegrated architecture of STAN5 and present results to demonstrate its potential on a variety of planning domains, including two that are currently beyond the problem-solving power of existing knowledge-sparse approaches
Efficient Implementation of the Plan Graph in STAN
STAN is a Graphplan-based planner, so-called because it uses a variety of
STate ANalysis techniques to enhance its performance. STAN competed in the
AIPS-98 planning competition where it compared well with the other competitors
in terms of speed, finding solutions fastest to many of the problems posed.
Although the domain analysis techniques STAN exploits are an important factor
in its overall performance, we believe that the speed at which STAN solved the
competition problems is largely due to the implementation of its plan graph.
The implementation is based on two insights: that many of the graph
construction operations can be implemented as bit-level logical operations on
bit vectors, and that the graph should not be explicitly constructed beyond the
fix point. This paper describes the implementation of STAN's plan graph and
provides experimental results which demonstrate the circumstances under which
advantages can be obtained from using this implementation
Hybrid STAN: Identifying and managing combinatorial optimisation sub-problems in planning
It is well-known that planning is hard but it is less well-known how to approach the hard parts of a problem instance effectively. Using static domain analysis techniques we can identify and abstract certain combinatorial sub-problems from a planning instance, and deploy specialised technology to solve these sub-problems in a way that is integrated with the broader planning activities. We have developed a hybrid planning system (STAN4) which brings together alternative planning strategies and specialised algorithms and selects them according to the structure of the planning domain. STAN4 participated successfully in the AIPS-2000 planning competition. We describe how sub-problem abstraction is done, with particular reference to route-planning abstraction, and present some of the competition data to demonstrate the potential power of the hybrid approach
Using learned action models in execution monitoring
Planners reason with abstracted models of the behaviours they use to construct plans. When plans are turned into the instructions that drive an executive, the real behaviours interacting with the unpredictable uncertainties of the environment can lead to failure. One of the challenges for intelligent autonomy is to recognise when the actual execution of a behaviour has diverged so far from the expected behaviour that it can be considered to be a failure. In this paper we present further developments of the work described in (Fox et al. 2006), where models of behaviours were learned as Hidden Markov Models. Execution of behaviours is monitored by tracking the most likely trajectory through such a learned model, while possible failures in execution are identified as deviations from common patterns of trajectories within the learned models. We present results for our experiments with a model learned for a robot behaviour
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