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- All Subjects: automated planning
- Creators: Kambhampati, Subbarao
Description
In this dissertation I develop a deep theory of temporal planning well-suited to analyzing, understanding, and improving the state of the art implementations (as of 2012). At face-value the work is strictly theoretical; nonetheless its impact is entirely real and practical. The easiest portion of that impact to highlight concerns the notable improvements to the format of the temporal fragment of the International Planning Competitions (IPCs). Particularly: the theory I expound upon here is the primary cause of--and justification for--the altered (i) selection of benchmark problems, and (ii) notion of "winning temporal planner". For higher level motivation: robotics, web service composition, industrial manufacturing, business process management, cybersecurity, space exploration, deep ocean exploration, and logistics all benefit from applying domain-independent automated planning technique. Naturally, actually carrying out such case studies has much to offer. For example, we may extract the lesson that reasoning carefully about deadlines is rather crucial to planning in practice. More generally, effectively automating specifically temporal planning is well-motivated from applications. Entirely abstractly, the aim is to improve the theory of automated temporal planning by distilling from its practice. My thesis is that the key feature of computational interest is concurrency. To support, I demonstrate by way of compilation methods, worst-case counting arguments, and analysis of algorithmic properties such as completeness that the more immediately pressing computational obstacles (facing would-be temporal generalizations of classical planning systems) can be dealt with in theoretically efficient manner. So more accurately the technical contribution here is to demonstrate: The computationally significant obstacle to automated temporal planning that remains is just concurrency.
ContributorsCushing, William Albemarle (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Weld, Daniel S. (Committee member) / Smith, David E. (Committee member) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Davalcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Current work in planning assumes that user preferences and/or domain dynamics are completely specified in advance, and aims to search for a single solution plan to satisfy these. In many real world scenarios, however, providing a complete specification of user preferences and domain dynamics becomes a time-consuming and error-prone task. More often than not, a user may provide no knowledge or at best partial knowledge of her preferences with respect to a desired plan. Similarly, a domain writer may only be able to determine certain parts, not all, of the model of some actions in a domain. Such modeling issues requires new concepts on what a solution should be, and novel techniques in solving the problem. When user preferences are incomplete, rather than presenting a single plan, the planner must instead provide a set of plans containing one or more plans that are similar to the one that the user prefers. This research first proposes the usage of different measures to capture the quality of such plan sets. These are domain-independent distance measures based on plan elements if no knowledge of the user preferences is given, or the Integrated Preference Function measure in case incomplete knowledge of such preferences is provided. It then investigates various heuristic approaches to generate plan sets in accordance with these measures, and presents empirical results demonstrating the promise of the methods. The second part of this research addresses planning problems with incomplete domain models, specifically those annotated with possible preconditions and effects of actions. It formalizes the notion of plan robustness capturing the probability of success for plans during execution. A method of assessing plan robustness based on the weighted model counting approach is proposed. Two approaches for synthesizing robust plans are introduced. The first one compiles the robust plan synthesis problems to the conformant probabilistic planning problems. The second approximates the robustness measure with lower and upper bounds, incorporating them into a stochastic local search for estimating distance heuristic to a goal state. The resulting planner outperforms a state-of-the-art planner that can handle incomplete domain models in both plan quality and planning time.
ContributorsNguyễn, Tuấn Anh (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Do, Minh (Committee member) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Smith, David E. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Different logic-based knowledge representation formalisms have different limitations either with respect to expressivity or with respect to computational efficiency. First-order logic, which is the basis of Description Logics (DLs), is not suitable for defeasible reasoning due to its monotonic nature. The nonmonotonic formalisms that extend first-order logic, such as circumscription and default logic, are expressive but lack efficient implementations. The nonmonotonic formalisms that are based on the declarative logic programming approach, such as Answer Set Programming (ASP), have efficient implementations but are not expressive enough for representing and reasoning with open domains. This dissertation uses the first-order stable model semantics, which extends both first-order logic and ASP, to relate circumscription to ASP, and to integrate DLs and ASP, thereby partially overcoming the limitations of the formalisms. By exploiting the relationship between circumscription and ASP, well-known action formalisms, such as the situation calculus, the event calculus, and Temporal Action Logics, are reformulated in ASP. The advantages of these reformulations are shown with respect to the generality of the reasoning tasks that can be handled and with respect to the computational efficiency. The integration of DLs and ASP presented in this dissertation provides a framework for integrating rules and ontologies for the semantic web. This framework enables us to perform nonmonotonic reasoning with DL knowledge bases. Observing the need to integrate action theories and ontologies, the above results are used to reformulate the problem of integrating action theories and ontologies as a problem of integrating rules and ontologies, thus enabling us to use the computational tools developed in the context of the latter for the former.
ContributorsPalla, Ravi (Author) / Lee, Joohyung (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Committee member) / Lifschitz, Vladimir (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Automated planning problems classically involve finding a sequence of actions that transform an initial state to some state satisfying a conjunctive set of goals with no temporal constraints. But in many real-world problems, the best plan may involve satisfying only a subset of goals or missing defined goal deadlines. For example, this may be required when goals are logically conflicting, or when there are time or cost constraints such that achieving all goals on time may be too expensive. In this case, goals and deadlines must be declared as soft. I call these partial satisfaction planning (PSP) problems. In this work, I focus on particular types of PSP problems, where goals are given a quantitative value based on whether (or when) they are achieved. The objective is to find a plan with the best quality. A first challenge is in finding adequate goal representations that capture common types of goal achievement rewards and costs. One popular representation is to give a single reward on each goal of a planning problem. I further expand on this approach by allowing users to directly introduce utility dependencies, providing for changes of goal achievement reward directly based on the goals a plan achieves. After, I introduce time-dependent goal costs, where a plan incurs penalty if it will achieve a goal past a specified deadline. To solve PSP problems with goal utility dependencies, I look at using state-of-the-art methodologies currently employed for classical planning problems involving heuristic search. In doing so, one faces the challenge of simultaneously determining the best set of goals and plan to achieve them. This is complicated by utility dependencies defined by a user and cost dependencies within the plan. To address this, I introduce a set of heuristics based on combinations using relaxed plans and integer programming formulations. Further, I explore an approach to improve search through learning techniques by using automatically generated state features to find new states from which to search. Finally, the investigation into handling time-dependent goal costs leads us to an improved search technique derived from observations based on solving discretized approximations of cost functions.
ContributorsBenton, J (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Do, Minh B. (Committee member) / Smith, David E. (Committee member) / Langley, Pat (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Humans and robots need to work together as a team to accomplish certain shared goals due to the limitations of current robot capabilities. Human assistance is required to accomplish the tasks as human capabilities are often better suited for certain tasks and they complement robot capabilities in many situations. Given the necessity of human-robot teams, it has been long assumed that for the robotic agent to be an effective team member, it must be equipped with automated planning technologies that helps in achieving the goals that have been delegated to it by their human teammates as well as in deducing its own goal to proactively support its human counterpart by inferring their goals. However there has not been any systematic evaluation on the accuracy of this claim.
In my thesis, I perform human factors analysis on effectiveness of such automated planning technologies for remote human-robot teaming. In the first part of my study, I perform an investigation on effectiveness of automated planning in remote human-robot teaming scenarios. In the second part of my study, I perform an investigation on effectiveness of a proactive robot assistant in remote human-robot teaming scenarios.
Both investigations are conducted in a simulated urban search and rescue (USAR) scenario where the human-robot teams are deployed during early phases of an emergency response to explore all areas of the disaster scene. I evaluate through both the studies, how effective is automated planning technology in helping the human-robot teams move closer to human-human teams. I utilize both objective measures (like accuracy and time spent on primary and secondary tasks, Robot Attention Demand, etc.) and a set of subjective Likert-scale questions (on situation awareness, immediacy etc.) to investigate the trade-offs between different types of remote human-robot teams. The results from both the studies seem to suggest that intelligent robots with automated planning capability and proactive support ability is welcomed in general.
In my thesis, I perform human factors analysis on effectiveness of such automated planning technologies for remote human-robot teaming. In the first part of my study, I perform an investigation on effectiveness of automated planning in remote human-robot teaming scenarios. In the second part of my study, I perform an investigation on effectiveness of a proactive robot assistant in remote human-robot teaming scenarios.
Both investigations are conducted in a simulated urban search and rescue (USAR) scenario where the human-robot teams are deployed during early phases of an emergency response to explore all areas of the disaster scene. I evaluate through both the studies, how effective is automated planning technology in helping the human-robot teams move closer to human-human teams. I utilize both objective measures (like accuracy and time spent on primary and secondary tasks, Robot Attention Demand, etc.) and a set of subjective Likert-scale questions (on situation awareness, immediacy etc.) to investigate the trade-offs between different types of remote human-robot teams. The results from both the studies seem to suggest that intelligent robots with automated planning capability and proactive support ability is welcomed in general.
ContributorsNarayanan, Vignesh (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Yu (Thesis advisor) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Allocating tasks for a day's or week's schedule is known to be a challenging and difficult problem. The problem intensifies by many folds in multi-agent settings. A planner or group of planners who decide such kind of task association schedule must have a comprehensive perspective on (1) the entire array of tasks to be scheduled (2) idea on constraints like importance cum order of tasks and (3) the individual abilities of the operators. One example of such kind of scheduling is the crew scheduling done for astronauts who will spend time at International Space Station (ISS). The schedule for the crew of ISS is decided before the mission starts. Human planners take part in the decision-making process to determine the timing of activities for multiple days for multiple crew members at ISS. Given the unpredictability of individual assignments and limitations identified with the various operators, deciding upon a satisfactory timetable is a challenging task. The objective of the current work is to develop an automated decision assistant that would assist human planners in coming up with an acceptable task schedule for the crew. At the same time, the decision assistant will also ensure that human planners are always in the driver's seat throughout this process of decision-making.
The decision assistant will make use of automated planning technology to assist human planners. The guidelines of Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) and the Human-In-The -Loop decision making were followed to make sure that the human is always in the driver's seat. The use cases considered are standard situations which come up during decision-making in crew-scheduling. The effectiveness of automated decision assistance was evaluated by setting it up for domain experts on a comparable domain of scheduling courses for master students. The results of the user study evaluating the effectiveness of automated decision support were subsequently published.
The decision assistant will make use of automated planning technology to assist human planners. The guidelines of Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) and the Human-In-The -Loop decision making were followed to make sure that the human is always in the driver's seat. The use cases considered are standard situations which come up during decision-making in crew-scheduling. The effectiveness of automated decision assistance was evaluated by setting it up for domain experts on a comparable domain of scheduling courses for master students. The results of the user study evaluating the effectiveness of automated decision support were subsequently published.
ContributorsMIshra, Aditya Prasad (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Chiou, Erin (Committee member) / Demakethepalli Venkateswara, Hemanth Kumar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
A critical challenge in the design of AI systems that operate with humans in the loop is to be able to model the intentions and capabilities of the humans, as well as their beliefs and expectations of the AI system itself. This allows the AI system to be "human- aware" -- i.e. the human task model enables it to envisage desired roles of the human in joint action, while the human mental model allows it to anticipate how its own actions are perceived from the point of view of the human. In my research, I explore how these concepts of human-awareness manifest themselves in the scope of planning or sequential decision making with humans in the loop. To this end, I will show (1) how the AI agent can leverage the human task model to generate symbiotic behavior; and (2) how the introduction of the human mental model in the deliberative process of the AI agent allows it to generate explanations for a plan or resort to explicable plans when explanations are not desired. The latter is in addition to traditional notions of human-aware planning which typically use the human task model alone and thus enables a new suite of capabilities of a human-aware AI agent. Finally, I will explore how the AI agent can leverage emerging mixed-reality interfaces to realize effective channels of communication with the human in the loop.
ContributorsChakraborti, Tathagata (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Talamadupula, Kartik (Committee member) / Scheutz, Matthias (Committee member) / Ben Amor, Hani (Committee member) / Zhang, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Automated planning addresses the problem of generating a sequence of actions that enable a set of agents to achieve their goals.This work investigates two important topics from the field of automated planning, namely model-lite planning and multi-agent planning. For model-lite planning, I focus on a prominent model named Annotated PDDL and it's related application of robust planning. For this model, I try to identify a method of leveraging additional domain information (available in the form of successful plan traces). I use this information to refine the set of possible domains to generate more robust plans (as compared to the original planner) for any given problem. This method also provides us a way of overcoming one of the major drawbacks of the original approach, namely the need for a domain writer to explicitly identify the annotations.
For the second topic, the central question I ask is ``{\em under what conditions are multiple agents actually needed to solve a given planning problem?}''. To answer this question, the multi-agent planning (MAP) problem is classified into several sub-classes and I identify the conditions in each of these sub-classes that can lead to required cooperation (RC). I also identify certain sub-classes of multi-agent planning problems (named DVC-RC problems), where the problems can be simplified using a single virtual agent. This insight is later used to propose a new planner designed to solve problems from these subclasses. Evaluation of this new planner on all the current multi-agent planning benchmarks reveals that most current multi-agent planning benchmarks only belong to a small subset of possible classes of multi-agent planning problems.
For the second topic, the central question I ask is ``{\em under what conditions are multiple agents actually needed to solve a given planning problem?}''. To answer this question, the multi-agent planning (MAP) problem is classified into several sub-classes and I identify the conditions in each of these sub-classes that can lead to required cooperation (RC). I also identify certain sub-classes of multi-agent planning problems (named DVC-RC problems), where the problems can be simplified using a single virtual agent. This insight is later used to propose a new planner designed to solve problems from these subclasses. Evaluation of this new planner on all the current multi-agent planning benchmarks reveals that most current multi-agent planning benchmarks only belong to a small subset of possible classes of multi-agent planning problems.
ContributorsSreedharan, Sarath (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Yu (Thesis advisor) / Ben Amor, Heni (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Decision support systems aid the human-in-the-loop by enhancing the quality of decisions and the ease of making them in complex decision-making scenarios. In the recent years, such systems have been empowered with automated techniques for sequential decision making or planning tasks to effectively assist and cooperate with the human-in-the-loop. This has received significant recognition in the planning as well as human computer interaction communities as such systems connect the key elements of automated planning in decision support to principles of naturalistic decision making in the HCI community. A decision support system, in addition to providing planning support, must be able to provide intuitive explanations based on specific user queries for proposed decisions to its end users. Using this as motivation, I consider scenarios where the user questions the system's suggestion by providing alternatives (referred to as foils). In response, I empower existing decision support technologies to engage in an interactive explanatory dialogue with the user and provide contrastive explanations based on user-specified foils to reach a consensus on proposed decisions. Furthermore, the foils specified by the user can be indicative of the latent preferences of the user. I use this interpretation to equip existing decision support technologies with three different interaction strategies that utilize the foil to provide revised plan suggestions. Finally, as part of my Master's thesis, I present RADAR-X, an extension of RADAR, a proactive decision support system, that showcases the above mentioned capabilities. Further, I present a user-study evaluation that emphasizes the need for contrastive explanations and a computational evaluation of the mentioned interaction strategies.
ContributorsValmeekam, Karthik (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Chiou, Erin (Committee member) / Sengupta, Sailik (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
The rapid advancements of technology have greatly extended the ubiquitous nature of smartphones acting as a gateway to numerous social media applications. This brings an immense convenience to the users of these applications wishing to stay connected to other individuals through sharing their statuses, posting their opinions, experiences, suggestions, etc on online social networks (OSNs). Exploring and analyzing this data has a great potential to enable deep and fine-grained insights into the behavior, emotions, and language of individuals in a society. This proposed dissertation focuses on utilizing these online social footprints to research two main threads – 1) Analysis: to study the behavior of individuals online (content analysis) and 2) Synthesis: to build models that influence the behavior of individuals offline (incomplete action models for decision-making).
A large percentage of posts shared online are in an unrestricted natural language format that is meant for human consumption. One of the demanding problems in this context is to leverage and develop approaches to automatically extract important insights from this incessant massive data pool. Efforts in this direction emphasize mining or extracting the wealth of latent information in the data from multiple OSNs independently. The first thread of this dissertation focuses on analytics to investigate the differentiated content-sharing behavior of individuals. The second thread of this dissertation attempts to build decision-making systems using social media data.
The results of the proposed dissertation emphasize the importance of considering multiple data types while interpreting the content shared on OSNs. They highlight the unique ways in which the data and the extracted patterns from text-based platforms or visual-based platforms complement and contrast in terms of their content. The proposed research demonstrated that, in many ways, the results obtained by focusing on either only text or only visual elements of content shared online could lead to biased insights. On the other hand, it also shows the power of a sequential set of patterns that have some sort of precedence relationships and collaboration between humans and automated planners.
A large percentage of posts shared online are in an unrestricted natural language format that is meant for human consumption. One of the demanding problems in this context is to leverage and develop approaches to automatically extract important insights from this incessant massive data pool. Efforts in this direction emphasize mining or extracting the wealth of latent information in the data from multiple OSNs independently. The first thread of this dissertation focuses on analytics to investigate the differentiated content-sharing behavior of individuals. The second thread of this dissertation attempts to build decision-making systems using social media data.
The results of the proposed dissertation emphasize the importance of considering multiple data types while interpreting the content shared on OSNs. They highlight the unique ways in which the data and the extracted patterns from text-based platforms or visual-based platforms complement and contrast in terms of their content. The proposed research demonstrated that, in many ways, the results obtained by focusing on either only text or only visual elements of content shared online could lead to biased insights. On the other hand, it also shows the power of a sequential set of patterns that have some sort of precedence relationships and collaboration between humans and automated planners.
ContributorsManikonda, Lydia (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / De Choudhury, Munmun (Committee member) / Kamar, Ece (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019