George Osborne has said contingency planning is taking place to anticipate the likely impact on the UK's financial stability of a vote to leave the EU. The chancellor told MPs there would be a "number of impacts" on the financial system that would have to be addressed. Economists have warned of market volatility and a sharp fall in sterling should there be a Leave vote. The chancellor said it would be up to the Bank of England to consider appropriate monetary responses. Mr Osborne, a key figure in the Remain campaign, has previously refused to be drawn on whether the Treasury and other public bodies were, in any way, preparing for the possibility of a Leave vote in the referendum on 23 June.

The proposal behind this paper is the introduction of a new agent denominated Go-Ahead: this is an automatic Go player that uses a new technique in order to improve the accuracy of the pre estimated values of the moves that are candidates to be introduced into the classical Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm which is used by many of the current top agents for Go. Go-Ahead is built upon the framework of one of these agents: the well known open source automatic player Fuego, in which these pre estimated values are obtained by means of a heuristic called prior knowledge. Go-Ahead copes with the task of refining the calculations of these values through a new technique that performs a balanced combination between the prior knowledge heuristic and some relevant information retrieved from the numerous play out simulation phases that are repeatedly executed throughout the Monte Carlo search. With such a strategy, Go-Ahead provides the contribution of enhancing the MCTS process of choosing appropriate moves. Further, this new approach attenuates the supervision level inherent to this process due to the following fact: it allows for the lessening of the impact of the prior knowledge heuris- tics through strengthening the impact of play out information. The results obtained in tournaments against Fuego confirm the benefits and the contributions provided by this approach.

Improved collaboration techniques for tasks executed collectively by multiple agents can lead to increased amount of information available to the agents, increased efficiency of resource utilization, reduced interference among the agents, and faster task completion. An example of a multiagent task that benefits from collaboration is Collective Transport with Obstacle Avoidance: the task of multiple agents jointly moving an object while navigating around obstacles. We propose a new approach to sharing and aggregation of information among the transporting agents that entails (1) considering all available information instead of only their own most pressing concerns through establishing objectively valued system needs and (2) being persuadable instead of stubborn, through assessing how these needs compare to the needs established by their peers. Our system extends and improves upon the work in (Ferrante et al. 2013), leading to better informed agents making efficient decisions that cause less inter-agent interference and lead to faster and more reliable completion of the collective task.

This paper presents an ontology-based application for mobile devices which is responsible for supporting groups of people with the management of their shared tasks. The ontology stores the domain knowledge about collaborative tasks, which is used to support task recognition and relocation. Such knowledge is used by a multi-agent system that consists of a group of agents representing each person in the group. The agents use plan recognition techniques to monitor the execution of tasks according to the schedules and negotiate task allocation when needed. Our techniques have been applied in a healthcare scenario which consists of a family group that takes care of an elderly person. This paper presents an ontology-based application for mobile devices which is responsible for supporting groups of people with the management of their shared tasks. % in a healthcare scenario.The ontology stores the domain knowledge about collaborative tasks, which is used to support task recognition and relocation.Such knowledge is used by a multi-agent system that consists of a group of agents representing each person in the group.The agents use plan recognition techniques to monitor the execution of tasks according to the schedules and negotiate task allocation when needed.Our techniques have been applied in a healthcare scenario which consists of a family group that takes care of an elderly person.

While domain descriptions are often shared and manipulated through diagrams, most complex domains are still described using text-based languages. Code becomes an intermediary between the real-world and an abstract idea, and the programmer is merely a converter of diagrams into code. For automated planning this is no different. The state transition function is described in terms of a textual representation of actions and, although simple actions require little effort to define by the user, the learning process is often slow. New users have no metaphor to help them to visualize the domain description that they are working on and little information about why a planner fails due to formalization errors. In this paper, we propose a visual abstraction for both the planning domain actions and the planning process itself, to facilitate the design of classical planning domains. Using this abstraction, we expect to improve the learning curve for defining and subsequently diagnosing problems with new planning domains.

Planning as programming is an approach to automated planning, where the planning domain model is expressed as a program in some (declarative) programming language. Then the modeler can exploit all features of that language to encode control knowledge important for efficient planning. In this paper we study these features in the logic programming language Picat and its planner module. In particular, we use two planning benchmarks, Nomystery and Childsnack, to compare factored and structured representations of states extended by encodings of control knowledge.

Google wants to take some of the pain out of scheduling work meetings with a new feature the company launched for its Calendar product on Wednesday. The new "Find a Time" feature in the Google Calendar Android app helps users pick out a time that works for everyone invited to a meeting without requiring them to spend ages going back and forth over email. Here's how it works: when a user sets up a meeting and adds people to the event, Find a Time will pick out a list of suggested times, along with who will be able to attend. Those suggestions will be built not only on the current state of an invitee's calendar, but also their historical scheduling trends. Once the organizer has picked a time, Google Calendar will send out invitations to everyone.

It's one thing to keep robots from crashing into fixed obstacles like walls or furniture, but preventing collisions with other moving things is a much tougher challenge. Targeting teams of robots working together, MIT on Thursday announced a new algorithm that helps robots avoid moving objects. Planning algorithms for robot teams can be centralized, in which a single computer makes decisions for the whole team, or decentralized, in which each robot makes its own decisions. The latter approach is much better in terms of incorporating local observations, but it's also much trickier, since each robot must essentially guess what the others are going to do. MIT's new algorithm takes a decentralized approach and factors in not just stationary obstacles but also moving ones.

Application of UAV in indoor environment is emerging nowadays due to the advancements in technology. UAV brings more space-flexibility in an occupied or hardly-accessible indoor environment, e.g., shop floor of manufacturing industry, greenhouse, nuclear powerplant. UAV helps in creating an autonomous manufacturing system by executing tasks with less human intervention in time-efficient manner. Consequently, a scheduler is one essential component to be focused on; yet the number of reported studies on UAV scheduling has been minimal. This work proposes a methodology with a heuristic (based on Earliest Available Time algorithm) which assigns tasks to UAVs with an objective of minimizing the makespan. In addition, a quick response towards uncertain events and a quick creation of new high-quality feasible schedule are needed. Hence, the proposed heuristic is incorporated with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to find a quick near optimal schedule. This proposed methodology is implemented into a scheduler and tested on a few scales of datasets generated based on a real flight demonstration. Performance evaluation of scheduler is discussed in detail and the best solution obtained from a selected set of parameters is reported.

With renewable energy becoming more common, energy prices fluctuate more depending on environmental factors such as the weather. Consuming energy without taking volatile prices into consideration can not only become expensive, but may also increase the peak load, which requires energy providers to generate additional energy using less environment-friendly methods. In the Netherlands, pumping stations that maintain the water levels of polder canals are large energy consumers, but the controller software currently used in the industry does not take real-time energy availability into account. We investigate if existing AI planning techniques have the potential to improve upon the current solutions. In particular, we propose a light weight but realistic simulator and investigate if an online planning method (UCT) can utilise this simulator to improve the cost-efficiency of pumping station control policies. An empirical comparison with the current control algorithms indicates that substantial cost, and thus peak load, reduction can be attained.