Axioms can be used to model derived predicates in domain-independent planning models. Formulating models which use axioms can sometimes result in problems with much smaller search spaces than the original model. We propose a method for automatically extracting a particular class of axioms from standard STRIPS PDDL models. More specifically, we identify operators whose effects become irrelevant given some other operator, and generate axioms that capture this relationship. We show that this algorithm can be used to successfully extract axioms from standard IPC benchmark instances, and show that the extracted axioms can be used to significantly improve the performance of satisficing planners.

It has been shown recently that heuristic and width-based search can be combined to produce planning algorithms with a performance that goes beyond the state-of-the-art. Such algorithms are based on best-first width search (BFWS), a plain best-first search set with evaluations functions combined lexicographically to break ties, some of which express novelty based preferences. In BFWS(f5), for example, the evaluation function f5 weights nodes by a novelty measure, breaking ties by the number of non-achieved goals. BFWS(f5) is a best-first algorithm, and hence, it is complete but not polynomial, and its performance doesn’t match the state of the art. In this work we show, however, that incomplete versions of BFWS(f5) where nodes with novelty greater than k are pruned, are not only polynomial but have an empirical performance that is better than both BFWS(f5) and state-of-the-art planners. This is shown by considering all the international planning competition instances. This is the first time where polynomial algorithms with meaningful bounds are shown to achieve state-of-the-art performance in planning. Practical and theoretical implications of this empirical finding are briefly sketched.

The problem of planning with partial observability in the presence of a single agent has been addressed as a contingent or POMDP problem. Since the task is computationally hard, on-line approaches have also been developed that just compute the action to do next rather than full policies. In this work, we address a similar problem but in a multiagent setting where agents share a common goal and plan with beliefs which are about the world and the possibly nested beliefs of other agents. For this, we extend the belief tracking formulation of Kominis and Geffner to the on-line setting where plans are supposed to work for the true hidden state as revealed by the observations, and develop an alternative translation into classical planning that is used within a plan-execute-observe-and-replan cycle. Planning is done from the perspective of the agents, and there is a single planning agent in each replanning episode that can change across episodes. We present empirical results and show that interesting agent dialogues arise in this setting where agents collaborate by requesting or volunteering information in a goal-directed manner.

Recent work in decentralized, schedule-driven traffic control has demonstrated the ability to significantly improve traffic flow efficiency in complex urban road networks. However, in situations where vehicle volumes increase to the point that the physical capacity of a road network reaches or exceeds saturation, it has been observed that the effectiveness of a schedule-driven approach begins to degrade, leading to progressively higher network congestion. In essence, the traffic control problem becomes less of a scheduling problem and more of a queue management problem in this circumstance. In this paper we propose a composite approach to real-time traffic control that uses sensed information on queue lengths to influence scheduling decisions and gracefully shift the signal control strategy to queue management in high volume/high congestion settings. Specifically, queue-length information is used to establish weights for the sensed vehicle clusters that must be scheduled through a given intersection at any point, and hence bias the wait time minimization calculation. To compute these weights, we develop a model in which successive movement phases are viewed as different states of an Ising model, and parameters quantify strength of interactions. To ensure scalability, queue information is only exchanged between direct neighbors and the asynchronous nature of local intersection scheduling is preserved. We demonstrate the potential of the approach through microscopic traffic simulation of a real-world road network, showing a 60% reduction in average wait times over the baseline schedule-driven approach in heavy traffic scenarios. We also report initial field test results, which show the ability to reduce queues during heavy traffic periods.

One of the most successful approaches to automated planning is the translation to propositional satisfiability (SA T). We employ incremental SA T solving to increase the capabilities of several modern encodings for SA T based planning. Experiments based on benchmarks from the 2014 International Planning Competition show that an incremental approach significantly outperforms non incremental solving. Although we are using sequential scheduling of makespans, we can outperform the state-of-the-art SA T based planning system Madagascar in the number of solved instances.

Symmetry breaking is a well-known method for search reduction. It identifies state-space symmetries prior to search, and prunes symmetric states during search. A recent proposal, star-topology decoupled search, is to search not in the state space, but in a factored version thereof, which avoids the multiplication of states across leaf components in an underlying star-topology structure. We show that, despite the much more complex structure of search states -- so-called decoupled states -- symmetry breaking can be brought to bear in this framework as well. Starting from the notion of structural symmetries over states, we identify a sub-class of such symmetries suitable for star-topology decoupled search, and we show how symmetries from that sub-class induce symmetry relations over decoupled states. We accordingly extend the routines required for search pruning and solution reconstruction. The resulting combined method can be exponentially better than both its components in theory, and this synergetic advantage is also manifested in practice: empirically, our method reliably inherits the best of its base components, and often outperforms them both.

Timeline-based planning is a paradigm that models temporal planning domains as sets of independent, but interacting, components. The behavior of the components can be described by means of a number of state variables whose evolution and interactions over time are governed by a set of temporal constraints. This paradigm is different from the one underlying the common action-based formalisms, such as PDDL, where the focus is on what can be done by an executive agent. Although successfully used in many real-world applications, little work has been done on the expressiveness and complexity of the timeline-based formalism. The present paper provides a characterization of the complexity of non-flexible timeline-based planning, by proving that a general formulation of the problem is EXPSPACE-complete. Such a result extends a previous work where the same complexity bound was proved for a restricted fragment of timeline-based planning that was shown to be expressive enough to capture action-based temporal planning. In addition, we prove that requiring an upper bound to the solution horizon as part of the input decreases the complexity of the problem, that becomes NEXPTIME-complete.

The plans that planning systems generate for solvable planning tasks are routinely verified by independent validation tools. For unsolvable planning tasks, no such validation capabilities currently exist. We describe a family of certificates of unsolvability for classical planning tasks that can be efficiently verified and are sufficiently general for a wide range of planning approaches including heuristic search with delete relaxation, critical-path, pattern database and linear merge-and-shrink heuristics, symbolic search with binary decision diagrams, and the Trapper algorithm for detecting dead ends. We also augmented a classical planning system with the ability to emit certificates of unsolvability and implemented a planner-independent certificate validation tool. Experiments show that the overhead for producing such certificates is tolerable and that their validation is practically feasible.

When minimizing makespan during off-line planning, the fastest action sequence to reach a particular state is, by definition, preferred. When trying to reach a goal quickly in on-line planning, previous work has inherited that assumption: the faster of two paths that both reach the same state is usually considered to dominate the slower one. In this short paper, we point out that, when planning happens concurrently with execution, selecting a slower action can allow additional time for planning, leading to better plans. We present Slo'RTS, a metareasoning planning algorithm that estimates whether the expected improvement in future decision-making from this increased planning time is enough to make up for the increased duration of the selected action. Using simple benchmarks, we show that Slo'RTS can yield shorter time-to-goal than a conventional planner. This generalizes previous work on metareasoning in on-line planning and highlights the inherent uncertainty present in an on-line setting.

When planning in temporal domains with required concurrency, envelopes arise where one or more actions need to occur within the execution of another. Starting an envelope action gives rise to an implicit relative deadline: all of the actions that need to occur within the envelope must complete before it ends. Finding effective heuristic guidance in these domains is challenging: the heuristic must not only consider how to reach the goals, but identify when it is not possible to achieve these implicit deadlines to avoid fruitless search. In this paper, we present an adaptation of a Temporal Relaxed Planning Graph heuristic, that accounts for dependencies between facts and actions in the relaxed planning graph; and the envelopes that are open in the state being evaluated. Results show that our new heuristic significantly improves the performance of a temporal planner on benchmark domains with required concurrency.