We present a principled way of extending a classical AI planning formalism with systems of state constraints, which relate - sometimes determine - the values of variables in each state traversed by the plan. This extension occupies an attractive middle ground between expressivity and complexity. It enables modelling a new range of problems, as well as formulating more efficient models of classical planning problems. An example of the former is planning-based control of networked physical systems - power networks, for example - in which a local, discrete control action can have global effects on continuous quantities, such as altering flows across the entire network. At the same time, our extension remains decidable as long as the satisfiability of sets of state constraints is decidable, including in the presence of numeric state variables, and we demonstrate that effective techniques for cost-optimal planning known in the classical setting - in particular, relaxation-based admissible heuristics - can be adapted to the extended formalism. In this paper, we apply our approach to constraints in the form of linear or non-linear equations over numeric state variables, but the approach is independent of the type of state constraints, as long as there exists a procedure that decides their consistency. The planner and the constraint solver interact through a well-defined, narrow interface, in which the solver requires no specialisation to the planning context.

In this paper we look into the problem of planning over hybrid domains, where change can be both discrete and instantaneous, or continuous over time. In addition, it is required that each state on the trajectory induced by the execution of plans complies with a given set of global constraints. We approach the computation of plans for such domains as the problem of searching over a deterministic state model. In this model, some of the successor states are obtained by solving numerically the so-called initial value problem over a set of ordinary differential equations (ODE) given by the current plan prefix. These equations hold over time intervals whose duration is determined dynamically, according to whether zero crossing events take place for a set of invariant conditions. The resulting planner, FS+, incorporates these features together with effective heuristic guidance. FS+ does not impose any of the syntactic restrictions on process effects often found on the existing literature on Hybrid Planning. A key concept of our approach is that a clear separation is struck between planning and simulation time steps. The former is the time allowed to observe the evolution of a given dynamical system before committing to a future course of action, whilst the later is part of the model of the environment. FS+ is shown to be a robust planner over a diverse set of hybrid domains, taken from the existing literature on hybrid planning and systems.

The Workshop Program of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16) was held at the beginning of the conference, February 12-13, 2016. Workshop participants met and discussed issues with a selected focus -- providing an informal setting for active exchange among researchers, developers and users on topics of current interest. To foster interaction and exchange of ideas, the workshops were kept small, with 25-65 participants. Attendance was sometimes limited to active participants only, but most workshops also allowed general registration by other interested individuals.

The Workshop Program of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16) was held at the beginning of the conference, February 12-13, 2016. Workshop participants met and discussed issues with a selected focus — providing an informal setting for active exchange among researchers, developers and users on topics of current interest. To foster interaction and exchange of ideas, the workshops were kept small, with 25-65 participants. Attendance was sometimes limited to active participants only, but most workshops also allowed general registration by other interested individuals. The AAAI-16 Workshops were an excellent forum for exploring emerging approaches and task areas, for bridging the gaps between AI and other fields or between subfields of AI, for elucidating the results of exploratory research, or for critiquing existing approaches. The fifteen workshops held at AAAI-16 were Artificial Intelligence Applied to Assistive Technologies and Smart Environments (WS-16-01), AI, Ethics, and Society (WS-16-02), Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security (WS-16-03), Artificial Intelligence for Smart Grids and Smart Buildings (WS-16-04), Beyond NP (WS-16-05), Computer Poker and Imperfect Information Games (WS-16-06), Declarative Learning Based Programming (WS-16-07), Expanding the Boundaries of Health Informatics Using AI (WS-16-08), Incentives and Trust in Electronic Communities (WS-16-09), Knowledge Extraction from Text (WS-16-10), Multiagent Interaction without Prior Coordination (WS-16-11), Planning for Hybrid Systems (WS-16-12), Scholarly Big Data: AI Perspectives, Challenges, and Ideas (WS-16-13), Symbiotic Cognitive Systems (WS-16-14), and World Wide Web and Population Health Intelligence (WS-16-15).

AAAI's 2015 Workshop Program was held Sunday and Monday, January 25–26, 2015 at the Hyatt Regency Austin Hotel in Austion, Texas, USA. The AAAI-15 workshop program included 15 workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. Most workshops were held on a single day. The titles of the workshops included AI and Ethics, AI for Cities, AI for Transportation: Advice, Interactivity and Actor Modeling, Algorithm Configuration, Artificial Intelligence Applied to Assistive Technologies and Smart Environments, Beyond the Turing Test, Computational Sustainability, Computer Poker and Imperfect Information, Incentive and Trust in E-Communities, Multiagent Interaction without Prior Coordination, Planning, Search, and Optimization, Scholarly Big Data: AI Perspectives, Challenges, and Ideas, Trajectory-Based Behaviour Analytics, World Wide Web and Public Health Intelligence, Knowledge, Skill, and Behavior Transfer in Autonomous Robots, and Learning for General Competency in Video Games.

AAAI's 2015 Workshop Program was held Sunday and Monday, January 25–26, 2015 at the Hyatt Regency Austin Hotel in Austion, Texas, USA. The AAAI-15 workshop program included 15 workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. Most workshops were held on a single day. The titles of the workshops included AI and Ethics, AI for Cities, AI for Transportation: Advice, Interactivity and Actor Modeling, Algorithm Configuration, Artificial Intelligence Applied to Assistive Technologies and Smart Environments, Beyond the Turing Test, Computational Sustainability, Computer Poker and Imperfect Information, Incentive and Trust in E-Communities, Multiagent Interaction without Prior Coordination, Planning, Search, and Optimization, Scholarly Big Data: AI Perspectives, Challenges, and Ideas, Trajectory-Based Behaviour Analytics, World Wide Web and Public Health Intelligence, Knowledge, Skill, and Behavior Transfer in Autonomous Robots, and Learning for General Competency in Video Games.

Energy consumption in commercial and educational buildings is impacted by group activities such as meetings, workshops, classes and exams, and can be reduced by scheduling these activities to take place at times and locations that are favorable from an energy standpoint. This paper improves on the effectiveness of energy-aware room-booking and occupancy scheduling approaches, by allowing the scheduling decisions to rely on an explicit model of the building's occupancy-based HVAC control. The core component of our approach is a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model which optimally solves the joint occupancy scheduling and occupancy-based HVAC control problem. To scale up to realistic problem sizes, we embed this MILP model into a large neighbourhood search (LNS). We obtain substantial energy reduction in comparison with occupancy-based HVAC control using arbitrary schedules or using schedules obtained by existing heuristic energy-aware scheduling approaches.

Energy consumption in commercial and educational buildings is impacted by group activities such as meetings, workshops, classes and exams, and can be reduced by scheduling these activities to take place at times and locations that are favorable from an energy standpoint. This paper improves on the effectiveness of energy-aware room-booking and occupancy scheduling approaches, by allowing the scheduling decisions to rely on an explicit model of the building's occupancy-based HVAC control. The core component of our approach is a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model which optimally solves the joint occupancy scheduling and occupancy-based HVAC control problem. To scale up to realistic problem sizes, we embed this MILP model into a large neighbourhood search (LNS). We obtain substantial energy reduction in comparison with occupancy-based HVAC control using arbitrary schedules or using schedules obtained by existing heuristic energy-aware scheduling approaches.

This paper proposes the problem of supply restoration in faulty power distribution systems as a benchmark for planning under uncertainty. This benchmark, which is derived from a significant real-world case, is both simple to understand and easily scalable. The goal is to reconfigure the distribution network to resupply a maximum of consumers affected by the faults.  Due to sensor and actuator uncertainty, the location of the faulty areas and the current network configuration are only partially observable.  This makes the problem very challenging.

A popular approach to solving a decision process with non-Markovian rewards (NMRDP) is to exploit a compact representation of the reward function to automatically translate the NMRDP into an equivalent Markov decision process (MDP) amenable to our favorite MDP solution method. The contribution of this paper is a representation of non-Markovian reward functions and a translation into MDP aimed at making the best possible use of state-based anytime algorithms as the solution method. By explicitly constructing and exploring only parts of the state space, these algorithms are able to trade computation time for policy quality, and have proven quite effective in dealing with large MDPs. Our representation extends future linear temporal logic (FLTL) to express rewards. Our translation has the effect of embedding model-checking in the solution method. It results in an MDP of the minimal size achievable without stepping outside the anytime framework, and consequently in better policies by the deadline.