robustness envelope
Towards Efficient Anytime Computation and Execution of Decoupled Robustness Envelopes for Temporal Plans
Cashmore, Michael, Cimatti, Alessandro, Magazzeni, Daniele, Micheli, Andrea, Zehtabi, Parisa
Robustness Envelopes characterize the set of possible contingencies that a plan is able to address without re-planning, but their exact computation is extremely expensive; furthermore, general robustness envelopes are not amenable for efficient execution. In this paper, we present a novel, anytime algorithm to approximate Robustness Envelopes, making them scalable and executable. This is proven by an experimental analysis showing the efficiency of the algorithm, and by a concrete case study where the execution of robustness envelopes significantly reduces the number of re-plannings. 1 Introduction When planning and scheduling techniques are employed in practical applications, one of the major problems is the need for online re-planning when the observed contingencies are not aligned with the ones that were considered at planning time. These situations are common, because it is arguably impossible to predict the entire range of situations an autonomous system can encounter, especially when the planning domain encompasses time and temporal constraints. Unfortunately, re-planning can be costly in terms of time, and computational resources can be scarce on-board, so limiting the use of re-planning is very important for practical purposes. In principle, it is also possible to continue with the execution of a plan even when the observed contingencies are unexpected, optimistically hoping for a successful completion. However, this approach offers no formal guarantee, and is prone to the risk of continuing execution of a plan that is bound to fail. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to address this problem (see (In-grand and Ghallab 2017) for a survey focused on robotics).