dimopoulo
A mosquito killer may lurk in a Mediterranean bacteria
Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Mosquito bites are much more than just a red and itchy summertime nuisance. The diseases that they carry are notoriously difficult to control and kill over 700,000 people worldwide every year. What's more, many mosquitoes have developed resistance to the synthetic insecticides–the same substances that can also pose environmental and health risks. As a solution, microbiologists are looking into biopesticides derived from living organisms.
Dimopoulos
Motivated by the requirements of many real-life applications, recent research in AI planning has shown a growing interest in tackling problems that involve numeric constraints and complex optimization objectives. Applying Integer Programming (IP) to such domains seems to have a significant potential, since it can naturally accommodate their representational requirements. In this paper we explore the area of applying IP to AI planning in two different directions. First, we improve the domain-independent IP formulation of Vossen et al., by an extended exploitation of mutual exclusion relations between the operators, and other information derivable by state of the art domain analysis tools. This information may reduce the number of variables of an IP model and tighten its constraints. Second, we link IP methods to recent work in heuristic search for planning, by introducing a variant of {\tt FF}'s enforced hill-climbing algorithm that uses IP models as its underlying representation. In addition to extending the delete lists heuristic to parallel planning and the more expressive language of IP, we also introduce a new heuristic based on the linear relaxation.