Planning & Scheduling
Functions Required for an Advanced Dynamic AI Scheduling System
A small and extremely powerful Artificial Intelligent Dynamic Scheduling System needs to schedule like a human by using the same required types and complexity as a human. This engine schedules movable components and items where a component or item can change location over time. A trainer trains the engine using specific scheduling tasks and scheduling requirements. After the engine is trained the engine identifies each component and item to schedule. Training provides the engine with the knowledge needed to properly schedule.
The IBaCoP Planning System: Instance-Based Configured Portfolios
Cenamor, Isabel, de la Rosa, Tomás, Fernández, Fernando
Sequential planning portfolios are very powerful in exploiting the complementary strength of different automated planners. The main challenge of a portfolio planner is to define which base planners to run, to assign the running time for each planner and to decide in what order they should be carried out to optimize a planning metric. Portfolio configurations are usually derived empirically from training benchmarks and remain fixed for an evaluation phase. In this work, we create a per-instance configurable portfolio, which is able to adapt itself to every planning task. The proposed system pre-selects a group of candidate planners using a Pareto-dominance filtering approach and then it decides which planners to include and the time assigned according to predictive models. These models estimate whether a base planner will be able to solve the given problem and, if so, how long it will take. We define different portfolio strategies to combine the knowledge generated by the models. The experimental evaluation shows that the resulting portfolios provide an improvement when compared with non-informed strategies. One of the proposed portfolios was the winner of the Sequential Satisficing Track of the International Planning Competition held in 2014.
Efficient Mechanism Design for Online Scheduling
Chen, Xujin, Hu, Xiaodong, Liu, Tie-Yan, Ma, Weidong, Qin, Tao, Tang, Pingzhong, Wang, Changjun, Zheng, Bo
This paper concerns the mechanism design for online scheduling in a strategic setting. In this setting, each job is owned by a self-interested agent who may misreport the release time, deadline, length, and value of her job, while we need to determine not only the schedule of the jobs, but also the payment of each agent. We focus on the design of incentive compatible (IC) mechanisms, and study the maximization of social welfare (i.e., the aggregated value of completed jobs) by competitive analysis. We first derive two lower bounds on the competitive ratio of any deterministic IC mechanism to characterize the landscape of our research. We then propose a deterministic IC mechanism and show that such a simple mechanism works very well for both the preemption-restart model and the preemption-resume model. We show the mechanism can achieve the optimal competitive ratio of 5 for equal-length jobs and a near optimal competitive ratio (within a constant factor) for unequal-length jobs.
Astronaut John Glenn's historic flight plan sold for 67K
FILE – In this June 28, 2016, file photo, former astronaut and U.S. Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, right, shakes hands with 8-year-old Josh Schick, left, before an event to mark the September 2016 renaming of Port Columbus International Airport to John Glenn Columbus International Airport in Columbus, Ohio. Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, turned 95 on Monday, July 18, 2016, and was trending on Twitter as well-wishers recognized his birthday.
The "How Does the President's Director of Scheduling Work?" Edition
Outside of Gregory Lorjuste's office, there's a whiteboard that he updates each day in large, carefully drawn characters. On the afternoon we visited him, it read, "The Final Countdown: 189 Days," a reflection of the time remaining for the Obama administration. That constantly shrinking figure holds special importance for Lorjuste, who serves as deputy assistant to the president and director of scheduling. But they're also responsible for larger calculations, most of all for figuring out how the administration can best use the time that remains.
Normative practical reasoning via argumentation and dialogue - Opus
In a normative environment an agent's actions are not only directed by its goals but also by the norms imposed on the agent. However, the potential conflicts within and between the agent's goals and norms makes decision-making in these frameworks a challenging task. The questions we are addressing in this paper are: (i) how should an agent act in a normative environment? We propose a solution in which a normative planning problem serves as the basis for a practical reasoning approach based on argumentation. The properties of the best plan(s) with respect to goal achievement and norm compliance are mapped to arguments that are used to explain why a plan is justified, using an existing proof dialogue game.
Activity Planning for a Lunar Orbital Mission
Bresina, John L. (NASA Ames Research Center)
This article describes a challenging, real-world planning problem within the context of a NASA mission called LADEE (Lunar Atmospheric and Dust Environment Explorer). One key aspect of this approach is the design of the activity planning process based on principles of problem decomposition and planning abstraction levels. The second key aspect is the mixed-initiative system developed for this task, called LASS (LADEE Activity Scheduling System). The primary challenge for LASS was representing and managing the science constraints that were tied to key points in the spacecraft's orbit, given their dynamic nature due to the continually updated orbit determination solution.
Robot Planning in the Real World: Research Challenges and Opportunities
Alterovitz, Ron (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) | Koenig, Sven (University of Southern California) | Likhachev, Maxim (Carnegie Mellon University)
Recent years have seen significant technical progress on robot planning, enabling robots to compute actions and motions to accomplish challenging tasks involving driving, flying, walking, or manipulating objects. However, robots that have been commercially deployed in the real world typically have no or minimal planning capability. These robots are often manually programmed, teleoperated, or programmed to follow simple rules. Although these robots are highly successful in their respective niches, a lack of planning capabilities limits the range of tasks for which currently deployed robots can be used. In this article, we highlight key conclusions from a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation in October 2013 that summarize opportunities and key challenges in robot planning and include challenge problems identified in the workshop that can help guide future research towards making robot planning more deployable in the real world.
Introduction to the Special Issue on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence 2015
Gunning, David (PARC) | Yeh, Peter Z. (Nuance Communications)
The 2015 conference continued the tradition with a selection of 6 deployed applications describing systems in use by their intended end users, 13 emerging applications describing works in progress, and three papers in a new category for challenge problems. In the first article, Activity Planning for a Lunar Orbital Mission, John Bresina describes a deployed application of current planning technology in the context of a NASA mission called LADEE (Lunar Atmospheric and Dust Environment Explorer). Bresina presents an approach taken to reduce the complexity of the activity-planning task in order to perform it effectively under the time pressures imposed by the mission requirements. One key aspect of this approach is the design of the activity-planning process based on principles of problem decomposition and planning abstraction levels. The second key aspect is the mixed-initiative system developed for this task, the LADEE activity scheduling system (LASS). The primary challenge for LASS was representing and managing the science constraints that were tied to key points in the spacecraft's orbit, given their dynamic nature due to the continually updated orbit determination solution. In our second article, Helping Novices Avoid the Hazards of Data: Leveraging Ontologies to Improve Model Generalization Automatically with Online Data Source, Sasin Janpuangtong and Dylan Shell describe an emerging application of an endto-end learning framework for large-scale data analytics that allows a novice to create models from data easily by helping structure the model-building process.
Activity Planning for a Lunar Orbital Mission
Bresina, John L. (NASA Ames Research Center)
This article describes a challenging, real-world planning problem within the context of a NASA mission called LADEE (Lunar Atmospheric and Dust Environment Explorer). I present the approach taken to reduce the complexity of the activity-planning task in order to perform it effectively under the time pressures imposed by the mission requirements. One key aspect of this approach is the design of the activity planning process based on principles of problem decomposition and planning abstraction levels. The second key aspect is the mixed-initiative system developed for this task, called LASS (LADEE Activity Scheduling System). The primary challenge for LASS was representing and managing the science constraints that were tied to key points in the spacecraft’s orbit, given their dynamic nature due to the continually updated orbit determination solution.