scholarly journals Effect-Abstraction Based Relaxation for Linear Numeric Planning

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dongxu Li ◽  
Enrico Scala ◽  
Patrik Haslum ◽  
Sergiy Bogomolov
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Additive Constant ◽  
Conditional Effects ◽  
Pruning Heuristics ◽  
Planning Problems

This paper studies an effect-abstraction based relaxation for reasoning about linear numeric planning problems. The effect-abstraction decomposes non-constant linear numeric effects into actions with conditional effects over additive constant numeric effects. With little effort, on this compiled version, it is possible to use known subgoaling based relaxations and relative heuristics. The combination of these two steps leads to a novel relaxation based heuristic. Theoretically, the relaxation is proved tighter than previous interval based relaxation and leading to safe-pruning heuristics. Empirically, a heuristic developed on this relaxation leads to substantial improvements for a class of problems that are currently out of the reach of state-of-the-art numeric planners.

scholarly journals On the Completeness of Pruning Techniques for Planning with Conditional Effects

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Dunbo Cai ◽  
Sheng Xu ◽  
Tongzhou Zhao ◽  
Yanduo Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Heuristic Search ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Search Procedure ◽  
Conditional Effects ◽  
Relevance Analysis ◽  
Pruning Strategy ◽  
Pruning Techniques

Pruning techniques and heuristics are two keys to the heuristic search-based planning. Thehelpful actionspruning (HAP) strategy andrelaxed-plan-based heuristicsare two representatives among those methods and are still popular in the state-of-the-art planners. Here, we present new analyses on the properties of HAP. Specifically, we show new reasons for which HAP can cause incompleteness of a search procedure. We prove that, in general, HAP is incomplete for planning with conditional effects if factored expansions of actions are used. To preserve completeness, we propose a pruning strategy that is based onrelevance analysisandconfrontation. We will show that bothrelevance analysisandconfrontationare necessary. We call it theconfrontation and goal relevant actionspruning (CGRAP) strategy. However, CGRAP is computationally hard to be exactly computed. Therefore, we suggest practical approximations from the literature.

scholarly journals Data-driven planning via imitation learning

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (13-14) ◽  
pp. 1632-1672 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjiban Choudhury ◽  
Mohak Bhardwaj ◽  
Sankalp Arora ◽  
Ashish Kapoor ◽  
Gireeja Ranade ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Partial Information ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Imitation Learning ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Sequential Decision ◽  
Efficient Manner ◽  
World State ◽  
Performance Guarantees ◽  
The World ◽  
Planning Problems

Robot planning is the process of selecting a sequence of actions that optimize for a task=specific objective. For instance, the objective for a navigation task would be to find collision-free paths, whereas the objective for an exploration task would be to map unknown areas. The optimal solutions to such tasks are heavily influenced by the implicit structure in the environment, i.e. the configuration of objects in the world. State-of-the-art planning approaches, however, do not exploit this structure, thereby expending valuable effort searching the action space instead of focusing on potentially good actions. In this paper, we address the problem of enabling planners to adapt their search strategies by inferring such good actions in an efficient manner using only the information uncovered by the search up until that time. We formulate this as a problem of sequential decision making under uncertainty where at a given iteration a planning policy must map the state of the search to a planning action. Unfortunately, the training process for such partial-information-based policies is slow to converge and susceptible to poor local minima. Our key insight is that if we could fully observe the underlying world map, we would easily be able to disambiguate between good and bad actions. We hence present a novel data-driven imitation learning framework to efficiently train planning policies by imitating a clairvoyant oracle: an oracle that at train time has full knowledge about the world map and can compute optimal decisions. We leverage the fact that for planning problems, such oracles can be efficiently computed and derive performance guarantees for the learnt policy. We examine two important domains that rely on partial-information-based policies: informative path planning and search-based motion planning. We validate the approach on a spectrum of environments for both problem domains, including experiments on a real UAV, and show that the learnt policy consistently outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms. Our framework is able to train policies that achieve up to [Formula: see text] more reward than state-of-the art information-gathering heuristics and a [Formula: see text] speedup as compared with A* on search-based planning problems. Our approach paves the way forward for applying data-driven techniques to other such problem domains under the umbrella of robot planning.

scholarly journals Bringing Order to Chaos – A Compact Representation of Partial Order in SAT-Based HTN Planning

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 7520-7529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregor Behnke ◽  
Daniel Höller ◽  
Susanne Biundo
Keyword(s):  
Partial Order ◽  
Propositional Logic ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Partial Ordering ◽  
Compact Representation ◽  
Planning Techniques ◽  
Model Complex ◽  
Htn Planning ◽  
Sat Solver ◽  
Planning Problems

HTN planning provides an expressive formalism to model complex application domains. It has been widely used in realworld applications. However, the development of domainindependent planning techniques for such models is still lacking behind. The need to be informed about both statetransitions and the task hierarchy makes the realisation of search-based approaches difficult, especially with unrestricted partial ordering of tasks in HTN domains. Recently, a translation of HTN planning problems into propositional logic has shown promising empirical results. Such planners benefit from a unified representation of state and hierarchy, but until now require very large formulae to represent partial order. In this paper, we introduce a novel encoding of HTN Planning as SAT. In contrast to related work, most of the reasoning on ordering relations is not left to the SAT solver, but done beforehand. This results in much smaller formulae and, as shown in our evaluation, in a planner that outperforms previous SAT-based approaches as well as the state-of-the-art in search-based HTN planning.

scholarly journals Bayesian Active Edge Evaluation on Expensive Graphs

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjiban Choudhury ◽  
Siddhartha Srinivasa ◽  
Sebastian Scherer
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Robots ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Complex Geometries ◽  
Time Motion ◽  
Decision Region ◽  
The World ◽  
Autonomous Helicopters ◽  
Explicit Enumeration ◽  
Planning Problems

We consider the problem of real-time motion planning that requires evaluating a minimal number of edges on a graph to quickly discover collision-free paths. Evaluating edges is expensive, both for robots with complex geometries like robot arms, and for robots sensing the world online like UAVs. Until now, this challenge has been addressed via laziness, i.e. deferring edge evaluation until absolutely necessary, with the hope that edges turn out to be valid. However, all edges are not alike in value - some have a lot of potentially good paths flowing through them, and some others encode the likelihood of neighbouring edges being valid. This leads to our key insight - instead of passive laziness, we can actively choose edges that reduce the uncertainty about the validity of paths. We show that this is equivalent to the Bayesian active learning paradigm of decision region determination (DRD). However, the DRD problem is not only combinatorially hard but also requires explicit enumeration of all possible worlds. We propose a novel framework that combines two DRD algorithms, DIRECT and BISECT, to overcome both issues. We show that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms on a spectrum of planning problems for mobile robots, manipulators and autonomous helicopters. 

scholarly journals Grounding of HTN Planning Domain

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (05) ◽  
pp. 1760021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdeldjalil Ramoul ◽  
Damien Pellier ◽  
Humbert Fiorino ◽  
Sylvie Pesty
Keyword(s):  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Autonomous Systems ◽  
Planning Problem ◽  
World State ◽  
Hierarchical Task Network ◽  
Htn Planning ◽  
Speed Up ◽  
International Planning ◽  
Planning Problems

Many Artificial Intelligence techniques have been developed for intelligent and autonomous systems to act and make rational decisions based on perceptions of the world state. Among these techniques, HTN (Hierarchical Task Network) planning is one of the most used in practice. HTN planning is based on expressive languages allowing to specify complex expert knowledge for real world domains. At the same time, many preprocessing techniques for classical planning were proposed to speed up the search. One of these technique, named grounding, consists in enumerating and instantiating all the possible actions from the planning problem descriptions. This technique has proven its effectiveness. Therefore, combining the expressiveness of HTN planning with the efficiency of the grounding preprocessing techniques used in classical planning is a very challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a generic algorithm to ground the domain representation for HTN planning. We show experimentally that grounding process improves the performances of state of the art HTN planners on a range of planning problems from the International Planning Competition (IPC).

scholarly journals Scaling up Heuristic Planning with Relational Decision Trees

2011 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 767-813 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. De la Rosa ◽  
S. Jimenez ◽  
R. Fuentetaja ◽  
D. Borrajo
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Search Algorithm ◽  
Learning Task ◽  
Classification Task ◽  
Evaluation Functions ◽  
Current State ◽  
Classification Tool ◽  
Search Control ◽  
Planning Problems ◽  
Relational Classification

Current evaluation functions for heuristic planning are expensive to compute. In numerous planning problems these functions provide good guidance to the solution, so they are worth the expense. However, when evaluation functions are misguiding or when planning problems are large enough, lots of node evaluations must be computed, which severely limits the scalability of heuristic planners. In this paper, we present a novel solution for reducing node evaluations in heuristic planning based on machine learning. Particularly, we define the task of learning search control for heuristic planning as a relational classification task, and we use an off-the-shelf relational classification tool to address this learning task. Our relational classification task captures the preferred action to select in the different planning contexts of a specific planning domain. These planning contexts are defined by the set of helpful actions of the current state, the goals remaining to be achieved, and the static predicates of the planning task. This paper shows two methods for guiding the search of a heuristic planner with the learned classifiers. The first one consists of using the resulting classifier as an action policy. The second one consists of applying the classifier to generate lookahead states within a Best First Search algorithm. Experiments over a variety of domains reveal that our heuristic planner using the learned classifiers solves larger problems than state-of-the-art planners.

Fast Strong Planning for FOND Problems with Multi-Root Directed Acyclic Graphs

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (06) ◽  
pp. 1460028 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andres Calderon Jaramillo ◽  
Jicheng Fu ◽  
Vincent Ng ◽  
Farokh B. Bastani ◽  
I-Ling Yen
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Solution Space ◽  
Strong Solutions ◽  
Search Space ◽  
Directed Acyclic Graphs ◽  
The State ◽  
Benchmark Problems ◽  
Acyclic Graphs ◽  
Planning Problems ◽  
Improve Planning

Recently, the state-of-the-art AI planners have significantly improved planning efficiency on Fully Observable Nondeterministic planning (FOND) problems with strong cyclic solutions. These strong cyclic solutions are guaranteed to achieve the goal if they terminate, implying that there is a possibility that they may run into indefinite loops. In contrast, strong solutions are guaranteed to achieve the goal, but few planners can effectively handle FOND problems with strong solutions. In this study, we aim to address this difficult, yet under-investigated class of planning problems: FOND planning problems with strong solutions. We present a planner that employs a new data structure, MRDAG (multi-root directed acyclic graph), to define how the solution space should be expanded. Based on the characteristics of MRDAG, we develop heuristics to ensure planning towards the relevant search direction and design optimizations to prune the search space to further improve planning efficiency. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate MRDAG, the heuristics, and the optimizations for pruning the search space. Experimental results show that our strong algorithm achieves impressive performance on a variety of benchmark problems: on average it runs more than three orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art planners, MBP and Gamer, while demonstrating significantly better scalability.

scholarly journals Multi-Agent Planning with Baseline Regret Minimization

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng Wu ◽  
Shlomo Zilberstein ◽  
Xiaoping Chen
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Benchmark Problems ◽  
Minimization Algorithm ◽  
Generation Algorithm ◽  
Regret Minimization ◽  
Multi Agent ◽  
Planning Problems ◽  
Multi Agent Planning ◽  
Better Than

We propose a novel baseline regret minimization algorithm for multi-agent planning problems modeled as finite-horizon decentralized POMDPs. It guarantees to produce a policy that is provably better than or at least equivalent to the baseline policy. We also propose an iterative belief generation algorithm to effectively and efficiently minimize the baseline regret, which only requires necessary iterations to converge to the policy with minimum baseline regret. Experimental results on common benchmark problems confirm its advantage comparing to the state-of-the-art approaches.

scholarly journals Solving Multiagent Planning Problems with Concurrent Conditional Effects

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 7594-7601
Author(s):  
Daniel Furelos-Blanco ◽  
Anders Jonsson
Keyword(s):  
Action Effects ◽  
Conditional Effects ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Multiagent Planning ◽  
Planning Problems

In this work we present a novel approach to solving concurrent multiagent planning problems in which several agents act in parallel. Our approach relies on a compilation from concurrent multiagent planning to classical planning, allowing us to use an off-the-shelf classical planner to solve the original multiagent problem. The solution can be directly interpreted as a concurrent plan that satisfies a given set of concurrency constraints, while avoiding the exponential blowup associated with concurrent actions. Our planner is the first to handle action effects that are conditional on what other agents are doing. Theoretically, we show that the compilation is sound and complete. Empirically, we show that our compilation can solve challenging multiagent planning problems that require concurrent actions.

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