The long-term future of space exploration at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is dependent on the full exploitation of autonomous and adaptive systems, but mission managers are worried about the reliability of these more intelligent systems. The main focus of the workshop was to address these worries; hence, we invited NASA engineers working on autonomous and adaptive systems and researchers interested in the verification and validation of software systems. The dual purpose of the meeting was to (1) make NASA engineers aware of the verification and validation techniques they could be using and (2) make the verification and validation community aware of the complexity of the systems NASA is developing. The workshop was held 5 to 7 December 2000 at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California.

Planning domains often feature subproblems such as route planning and resource handling. Using static domain analysis techniques, we have been able to identify certain commonly occurring subproblems within planning domains, making it possible to abstract these subproblems from the overall goals of the planner and deploy specialized technology to handle them in a way integrated with the broader planning activities. Using two such subsolvers our hybrid planner, stan4, participated successfully in the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS'00) planning competition.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented the 2000 Fall Symposium Series was held on Friday through Sunday, 3 to 5 November, at the Sea Crest Oceanfront Conference Center. The titles of the five symposia were (1) Building Dialogue Systems for Tutorial Applications, (2) Learning How to Do Things, (3) Parallel Cognition for Embodied Agents, (4) Simulating Human Agents, and (5) Socially Intelligent Agents: The Human in the Loop.

The planning competition has become a regular part of the biennial Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS) conferences. AIPS'98 featured the very first competition, and for AIPS'00, we built on this foundation to run the second competition. The 2000 competition featured a much larger group of participants and a wide variety of different approaches to planning. Some of these approaches were refinements of known techniques, and others were quite different from anything that had been tried before. Besides the dramatic increase in participation, the 2000 competition demonstrated that planning technology has taken a giant leap forward in performance since 1998. The 2000 competition featured planning systems that were orders of magnitude faster than the planners of just two years prior. This article presents an overview of the competition and reviews the main results.

That is, it does not do Fikes and Nilsson (1971) (called forwardchaining, something like "to achieve g, try to achieve g This factor seemed to be crucial in making [1998]). Briefly speaking, given a conjunction our algorithm effective on some of of simple goals, it selects one of them to work domains at the competition. In general, some of goal based on the actions that have this these conditions can contain variables, and simple goal as one of their effects and recursively these variables are eventually grounded by tries to achieve the new goal. If there is no user-provided information, on starting up is the initial state description. If all In comparison, our algorithm does not of them are true already, then it performs the modify the initial state description. The planner then selects an action maintains a global list Γ that represents the that can make g true; consider first the conjunction sequence of actions that the planner has found of all ground preconditions of this to this point.

For more details, see Nau et al. 's preconditions can include logical inferences, 's preconditions two methods for traveling from one location can include Horn-clause inferencing, numeric to another: (1) traveling by airplane and (2) computations, and calls to external programs. 's expressive power can be used to create a totally ordered list of subtasks. Suppose domain representations for complex application that all these subtasks are primitive except for domains. For example, the Horn 4. if t is primitive (i.e., there is an operator for t) then clauses can include calls to attached procedures 5. nondeterministically choose an operator o for t We believe the primary 14. endif's higher level of expressivity made it possible to formulate highly expressive domain algorithms in's data structures to make them faster; for example, we found that a simple change to the data structure We intend to make more optimizations in the near future. (Aha and Breslow 1997).

Mips is a planning system that applies binary decision diagrams (BDDs) to compactly represent world states in a planning problem and efficiently explore the underlying state space. It was the first general planning system based on model-checking methods. It can handle the strips subset of the pddl language and some additional features from adl, namely, negative preconditions and (universal) conditional effects. At the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS'00), mips was one of five planning systems to be awarded for distinguished performance in the fully automated track. This article gives a brief introduction to, and explains the basic planning algorithm used by, mips, using a simple logistics problem as an example.

The main idea that arise during the forward search phase and of the planner is to compute offline, in the preprocessing the goals. This approach succeeds in the notion of related facts in the goal-regression avoiding computing estimates for invalid facts process. These are facts that have been achieved in the preprocessing phase. However, it introduces either by the same or subsequent actions, without some problems in situations where the the last actions deleting the facts achieved goal state is not completely described because first. The cost of achieving simultaneously a set an action to regress the goals might not exist. of unrelated facts is considered equal to the To cope with this situation, at the beginning sum of their individual costs, whereas the cost of the preprocessing phase, We know from our experience that if move actions were Table 1.

TALplanner is a forward-chaining planner that utilizes domain-dependent knowledge to control search in the state space generated by action invocation. The domain-dependent control knowledge, background knowledge, plans, and goals are all represented using formulas in a temporal logic called tal, which has been developed independently as a formalism for specifying agent narratives and reasoning about them. In the Fifth International Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling Conference planning competition, TALplanner exhibited impressive performance, winning the Outstanding Performance Award in the Domain-Dependent Planning Competition. In this article, we provide an overview of TALplanner

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2001 Spring Symposium Series on Monday through Wednesday, 26 to 28 March 2001, at Stanford University. The titles of the seven symposia were (1) Answer Set Programming: Toward Efficient and Scalable Knowledge, Representation and Reasoning, (2) Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment, (3) Game-Theoretic and Decision-Theoretic Agents, (4) Learning Grounded Representations, (5) Model-Based Validation of Intelligence, (6) Robotics and Education, and (7) Robust Autonomy.