Recent years have seen an increasing number of deployment of fleets of autonomous vehicles. As the problem scales up, in terms of autonomous vehicles number and complexity of their objectives, there is a growing need for decision-support tooling to help the operators in controlling the fleet. In this paper, we present an automated planning system developed to assist the operators in the CoHoMa II challenge, where a fleet of robots, remotely controlled by a handful of operators, must explore and progress through a potential hostile area. In this context, we use planning to provide the operators with suggestions about the actions to consider and their allocation to the robots. This paper especially focus on the modelling of the problem as a hierarchical planning problem for which we use a state-of-the-art automated solver.

The formalism of Simple Temporal Networks (STNs) provides methods for evaluating the feasibility of temporal plans. The basic formalism deals with the consistency of quantitative temporal requirements on scheduled events. This implicitly assumes a single agent has full control over the timing of events. The extension of Simple Temporal Networks with Uncertainty (STNU) introduces uncertainty into the timing of some events. Two main approaches to the feasibility of STNUs involve (1) where a single schedule works irrespective of the duration outcomes, called Strong Controllability, and (2) whether a strategy exists to schedule future events based on the outcomes of past events, called Dynamic Controllability. Case (1) essentially assumes the timing of uncertain events cannot be observed by the agent while case (2) assumes full observability. The formalism of Partially Observable Simple Temporal Networks with Uncertainty (POSTNU) provides an intermediate stance between these two extremes, where a known subset of the uncertain events can be observed when they occur. A sound and complete polynomial algorithm to determining the Dynamic Controllability of POSTNUs has not previously been known; we present one in this paper. This answers an open problem that has been posed in the literature. The approach we take factors the problem into Strong Controllability micro-problems in an overall Dynamic Controllability macro-problem framework. It generalizes the notion of labeled distance graph from STNUs. The generalized labels are expressed as max/min expressions involving the observables. The paper introduces sound generalized reduction rules that act on the generalized labels. These incorporate tightenings based on observability that preserve dynamic viable strategies. It is shown that if the generalized reduction rules reach quiescence without exposing an inconsistency, then the POSTNU is Dynamically Controllable (DC). The paper also presents algorithms that apply the reduction rules in an organized way and reach quiescence in a polynomial number of steps if the POSTNU is Dynamically Controllable. Remarkably, the generalized perspective leads to a simpler and more uniform framework that applies also to the STNU special case. It helps illuminate the previous methods inasmuch as the max/min label representation is more semantically clear than the ad-hoc upper/lower case labels previously used.

Temporal planning offers numerous advantages when based on an expressive representation. Timelines have been known to provide the required expressiveness but at the cost of search efficiency. We propose here a temporal planner, called FAPE, which supports many of the expressive temporal features of the ANML modeling language without loosing efficiency. FAPE's representation coherently integrates flexible timelines with hierarchical refinement methods that can provide efficient control knowledge. A novel reachability analysis technique is proposed and used to develop causal networks to constrain the search space. It is employed for the design of informed heuristics, inference methods and efficient search strategies. Experimental results on common benchmarks in the field permit to assess the components and search strategies of FAPE, and to compare it to IPC planners. The results show the proposed approach to be competitive with less expressive planners and often superior when hierarchical control knowledge is provided. FAPE, a freely available system, provides other features, not covered here, such as the integration of planning with acting, and the handling of sensing actions in partially observable environments.

We present a general constraint-based encoding for domain-independent task planning. Task planning is characterized by causal relationships expressed as conditions and effects of optional actions. Possible actions are typically represented by templates, where each template can be instantiated into a number of primitive actions. While most previous work for domain-independent task planning has focused on primitive actions in a state-oriented view, our encoding uses a fully lifted representation at the level of action templates. It follows a time-oriented view in the spirit of previous work in constraint-based scheduling. As a result, the proposed encoding is simple and compact as it grows with the number of actions in a solution plan rather than the number of possible primitive actions. When solved with an SMT solver, we show that the proposed encoding is slightly more efficient than state-of-the-art methods on temporally constrained planning benchmarks while clearly outperforming other fully constraint-based approaches.

Observation planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a challenging task as it requires planning trajectories over a large continuous space and with motion models that can not be directly encoded into current planners. Furthermore, realistic problems often require complex objective functions that complicate problem decomposition. In this paper, we propose a local search approach to plan the trajectories of a fleet of UAVs on an observation mission. The strength of the approach lies in its loose coupling with domain specific requirements such as the UAV model or the objective function that are both used as black boxes. Furthermore, the Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) procedure considered facilitates the adaptation of the algorithm to specific requirements through the addition of new neighborhoods. We demonstrate the feasibility and convenience of the method on a large joint observation task in which a fleet of fixed-wing UAVs maps wildfires over areas of a hundred square kilometers. The approach allows generating plans over tens of minutes for a handful of UAVs in matter of seconds, even when considering very short primitive maneuvers.

Smart factories are on the verge of becoming the new industrial paradigm, wherein optimization permeates all aspects of production, from concept generation to sales. To fully pursue this paradigm, flexibility in the production means as well as in their timely organization is of paramount importance. AI is planning a major role in this transition, but the scenarios encountered in practice might be challenging for current tools. Task planning is one example where AI enables more efficient and flexible operation through an online automated adaptation and rescheduling of the activities to cope with new operational constraints and demands. In this paper we present SMarTplan, a task planner specifically conceived to deal with real-world scenarios in the emerging smart factory paradigm. Including both special-purpose and general-purpose algorithms, SMarTplan is based on current automated reasoning technology and it is designed to tackle complex application domains. In particular, we show its effectiveness on a logistic scenario, by comparing its specialized version with the general purpose one, and extending the comparison to other state-of-the-art task planners.