Technology
Timeline-Based Space Operations Scheduling with External Constraints
Chien, Steve (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology) | Tran, Daniel (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology) | Rabideau, Gregg (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology) | Schaffer, Steve (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology) | Mandl, Daniel (Godard Space Flight Center) | Frye, Stuart (SGT/GSFC)
We describe a timeline-based scheduling algorithm developed for mission operations of the EO-1 earth observing satellite. We first describe the range of operational constraints for operations focusing on maneuver and thermal constraints that cannot be modeled in typical planner/schedulers. We then describe a greedy heuristic scheduling algorithm and compare its performance to both the prior scheduling algorithm - documenting an over 50% increase in scenes scheduled with estimated value of millions of dollars US. We also compare to a relaxed optimal scheduler showing that the greedy scheduler produces schedules with scene count within 15% of an upper bound on optimal schedules.
Planning for Concurrent Action Executions Under Action Duration Uncertainty Using Dynamically Generated Bayesian Networks
Beaudry, Eric (Universite de Sherbrooke) | Kabanza, Froduald (Universite de Sherbrooke) | Michaud, Francois (Universite de Sherbrooke)
An interesting class of planning domains, including planning for daily activities of Mars rovers, involves achievement of goals with time constraints and concurrent actions with probabilistic durations. Current probabilistic approaches, which rely on a discrete time model, introduce a blow up in the search state-space when the two factors of action concurrency and action duration uncertainty are combined. Simulation-based and sampling probabilistic planning approaches would cope with this state explosion by avoiding storing all the explored states in memory, but they remain approximate solution approaches. In this paper, we present an alternative approach relying on a continuous time model which avoids the state explosion caused by time stamping in the presence of action concurrency and action duration uncertainty. Time is represented as a continuous random variable. The dependency between state time variables is conveyed by a Bayesian network, which is dynamically generated by a state-based forward-chaining search based on the action descriptions. A generated plan is characterized by a probability of satisfying a goal. The evaluation of this probability is done by making a query the Bayesian network.
Using Backwards Generated Goals for Heuristic Planning
Alcรกzar, Vidal (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) | Borrajo, Daniel (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) | Lรณpez, Carlos Linares (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)
Forward State Planning with Reachability Heuristics is arguably the most successful approach to Automated Planning up to date. In addition to an estimation of the distance to the goal, relaxed plans obtained with such heuristics provide the search with useful information such as helpful actions and look-ahead states. However, this information is extracted only from the beginning of the relaxed plan. In this paper, we propose using information extracted from the last actions in the relaxed plan to generate intermediate goals backwards. This allows us to use information from previous computations of the heuristic and reduce the depth of the search tree.
Preface
Brafman, Ronen I. (Ben-Gurion University) | Geffner, Hector (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) | Hofman, Joerg (INRIA) | Kautz, Henry (University of Rochester)
International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, held in Toronto, Ontario, For ICAPS 2010, we received 113 submissions Canada, May 12-16, 2010. The annual ICAPS from authors of 31 countries, representing all conference series was established in 2003 continents. From these submissions, 79 were through the merger of two preexisting biennial full papers, 29 were short ones, and 5 were position conferences, the International Conference on or challenge papers. These papers were all Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling reviewed by a Program Committee made up of (AIPS) and the European Conference on Planning 76 members, coordinated by 10 Senior Members, (ECP). ICAPS continues the traditional and the four PC Chairs.
The Exact Closest String Problem as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem
We report (to our knowledge) the first evaluation of Constraint Satisfaction as a computational framework for solving closest string problems. We show that careful consideration of symbol occurrences can provide search heuristics that provide several orders of magnitude speedup at and above the optimal distance. We also report (to our knowledge) the first analysis and evaluation -- using any technique -- of the computational difficulties involved in the identification of all closest strings for a given input set. We describe algorithms for web-scale distributed solution of closest string problems, both purely based on AI backtrack search and also hybrid numeric-AI methods.
Electronic Geometry Textbook: A Geometric Textbook Knowledge Management System
Electronic Geometry Textbook is a knowledge management system that manages geometric textbook knowledge to enable users to construct and share dynamic geometry textbooks interactively and efficiently. Based on a knowledge base organizing and storing the knowledge represented in specific languages, the system implements interfaces for maintaining the data representing that knowledge as well as relations among those data, for automatically generating readable documents for viewing or printing, and for automatically discovering the relations among knowledge data. An interface has been developed for users to create geometry textbooks with automatic checking, in real time, of the consistency of the structure of each resulting textbook. By integrating an external geometric theorem prover and an external dynamic geometry software package, the system offers the facilities for automatically proving theorems and generating dynamic figures in the created textbooks. This paper provides a comprehensive account of the current version of Electronic Geometry Textbook.
Toggling operators in computability logic
Computability logic (CL) (see http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~giorgi/cl.html ) is a research program for redeveloping logic as a formal theory of computability, as opposed to the formal theory of truth which it has more traditionally been. Formulas in CL stand for interactive computational problems, seen as games between a machine and its environment; logical operators represent operations on such entities; and "truth" is understood as existence of an effective solution. The formalism of CL is open-ended, and may undergo series of extensions as the studies of the subject advance. So far three -- parallel, sequential and choice -- sorts of conjunction and disjunction have been studied. The present paper adds one more natural kind to this collection, termed toggling. The toggling operations can be characterized as lenient versions of choice operations where choices are retractable, being allowed to be reconsidered any finite number of times. This way, they model trial-and-error style decision steps in interactive computation. The main technical result of this paper is constructing a sound and complete axiomatization for the propositional fragment of computability logic whose vocabulary, together with negation, includes all four -- parallel, toggling, sequential and choice -- kinds of conjunction and disjunction. Along with toggling conjunction and disjunction, the paper also introduces the toggling versions of quantifiers and recurrence operations.
Joint Structured Models for Extraction from Overlapping Sources
Gupta, Rahul, Sarawagi, Sunita
We consider the problem of jointly training structured models for extraction from sources whose instances enjoy partial overlap. This has important applications like user-driven ad-hoc information extraction on the web. Such applications present new challenges in terms of the number of sources and their arbitrary pattern of overlap not seen by earlier collective training schemes applied on two sources. We present an agreement-based learning framework and alternatives within it to trade-off tractability, robustness to noise, and extent of agreement. We provide a principled scheme to discover low-noise agreement sets in unlabeled data across the sources. Through extensive experiments over 58 real datasets, we establish that our method of additively rewarding agreement over maximal segments of text provides the best trade-offs, and also scores over alternatives such as collective inference, staged training, and multi-view learning.
Simple Type Theory as Framework for Combining Logics
Simple type theory is suited as framework for combining classical and non-classical logics. This claim is based on the observation that various prominent logics, including (quantified) multimodal logics and intuitionistic logics, can be elegantly embedded in simple type theory. Furthermore, simple type theory is sufficiently expressive to model combinations of embedded logics and it has a well understood semantics. Off-the-shelf reasoning systems for simple type theory exist that can be uniformly employed for reasoning within and about combinations of logics.
The Application of a Dendritic Cell Algorithm to a Robotic Classifier
Oates, Robert, Greensmith, Julie, Aickelin, Uwe, Garibaldi, Jonathan M., Kendall, Graham
The dendritic cell algorithm is an immune-inspired technique for processing time-dependant data. Here we propose it as a possible solution for a robotic classification problem. The dendritic cell algorithm is implemented on a real robot and an investigation is performed into the effects of varying the migration threshold median for the cell population. The algorithm performs well on a classification task with very little tuning. Ways of extending the implementation to allow it to be used as a classifier within the field of robotic security are suggested.