CISC 889  -   Topics in Planning  -   Spring 1998

T/Th 3:30-4:45am, [Smith Hall 102a]
 
Instructor: Keith Decker 
Office: Room 204, The Green House (77 E. Delaware) 
Hours: T/Th 11:00am-12:00pm 
Phone: 831-1959 
Email: decker@cis.udel.edu 

Course Description

This seminar will focus on the current state-of-the-art in AI Planning systems. Arguably one of AI's great sucesses (e.g., govt. use of AI logistics planning) there is still much work to be done. Planning impacts many areas of AI, including Multi-Agent Systems and Natural Language Processing. Topics include partial order/generative planning vs. hierarchical task network planning, planning under uncertainty, interleaved planning and execution, distributed planning.

Format

Seminar. I'll teach the first few overview classes, and then we'll read important and new papers, and take turns leading discussions.  Students taking the course for credit should prepare 3 discussion (or, if needed, clarification questions) questions to be handed in after class.  Good discussion questions should compare and contrast approaches, consider evaluation of the works, and relate them to your own particular research interests.

A small project ---preferrably the use of one of the existing planners (UCPOP, Graphplan, UM-Nonlin, UMCP, DRIPS, etc.) that are freely available on some problem related to your own research work---will be due.

Grading:

Topics

Topics will be open to class interests, but here's some suggestions: Once we get through the overview, I can alter the topic list to focus on issues that you find interesting (again, trying to mix classic and new papers)
 
DATE TOPIC READING PERSON
2/10 Introduction Tom Dean and Subbarao Kambhampati. "Complexity, Decidability and Undecidablity results for domain-independent planning". Artificial Intelligence, 1995.  Decker
2/12 NO CLASS Decker
2/17 Generative Planning Russell & Norvig Chapter 11; 12.4, 12.5 Decker
2/19 "An Introduction to Least-Commitment Planning", Dan Weld, (AI Magazine, Winter '94)  Decker
2/24 Hierarchical Planning Russell & Norvig Chapter 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 

K. Erol, D. Nau, J. Hendler. "Semantics for Hierarchical Task-Network Planning." Technical report CS-TR-3239, UMIACS-TR-94-31, Computer Science Dept., University of Maryland, March 1994. 
(long version of AIPS-94 paper)

 Jon
2/26 Craig A. Knoblock, "Search reduction in hierarchical problem solving," AAAI-91 

Barrett & Weld, "Task decomposition via Plan Parsing," AAAI-94

 Salim
3/3 Refinement Subbarao Kambhampati, Craig A. Knoblock, and Qiang Yang, "Planning as Refinement Search: A Unified Framework for Evaluating the Design Tradeoffs in Partial Order Planning," Artificial Intelligence, 1995. [Code] Decker
3/5 [CONTINUED] Decker
3/10 Plan Graph AnalysisA. Blum and M. Furst, "Fast Planning Through Planning Graph 
Analysis", Artificial Intelligence, 90:281--300 (1997). 
[Graphplan Homepage] 
(add conditional effects paper? Anderson/Smith/Weld AIPS98)		 Ertok
3/12 Approximate Planning Matt Ginsberg, "Approximate Planning." Artificial Intelligence, 1995 Yufeng
3/17 Constraint Satisfaction David Joslin and Martha E. Pollack. "Passive and active decision postponement in plan generation." In European Workshop on Planning (EWSP), Assisi, Italy, 1995.  Weihua
3/19 Monte Zweben, Brian Daun, Eugene Davis and Michael Deale. "Scheduling and Rescheduling with Iterative Repair." Chapter in Intelligent Scheduling, Morgan Kaufmann,1994.  (or similar paper) Ziying
3/24 Matthew L. Ginsberg and David McAllester. "GSAT and Dynamic Backtracking," In Proceedings of the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Conference, May 1994.  John
3/26 Learning to Improve Planning Performance Steven Minton and Jaime G. Carbonell. "Strategies for learning search control rules: An explanation-based approach." In Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Milan, Italy, 1987. Salim
3/26 PROJECT PROPSALS DUE TODAY
3/31 Case-based Planning CHEF [Hammond] Leah
4/2 Manuela Veloso. Flexible strategy learning: analogical replay of problem solving episodes In Proc. AAAI-94, 1994. 
 		 Yunpeng
4/7 Spring Break
4/9 Spring Break
4/14 Probabilistic / Decision Theoretic Planning An Algorithm for Probabilistic Least-Commitment Planning [BURIDAN] Kushmerick, Hanks, and Weld, AAAI-94. 
See also here.		 Mandar
4/16 Decision-Theoretic Refinement planning using Inheritance Abstraction [DRIPS] Haddawy and Suwandi, AIPS-94 

Decision-Theoretic Refinement Planning: A New Method for clinical Decision Analysis, Doan, Haddawy, and Kahn, SCAMC-95

 Jon
4/21 Sensing & Incomplete Info Duane Olawsky and Maria Gini. "Deferred planning and sensor use." In Proceedings of the Workshop on Innovative Approaches to Planning, Scheduling and Control, pages 166--174, San Diego, CA, 1990. 
(should have done etzioni,hanks,weld,draper,lesh,williamson here (KR92))		 Yunpeng
4/23 Draper, Hanks, and Weld. "Probabalistic Planning with Information Gathering and Contingent Execution" [CBURIDAN] Leah
4/28 Planning and Acting Russel & Norvig Chapter 13 [NO! do this earlier! at 4/21], 
"Building a Planner for Information Gathering: A Report from the 
Trenches " Knoblock, AIPS-96 [SAGE]		 Elif
4/30 Robots: "Task networks for controlling Continuous Processes", Firby AIPS-96. 
"Becoming Increasingly Reliable," Simmons, AIPS-96		 John
5/5   Softbots: "Planning-based control of software Agents,", Weld, AIPS96. 
"Executing Decision-theoretic Plans in Multi-agent Environments," Williamson, Decker, Sycara, AAAI-FallSymp, 1996.		 Ziying
5/7 Distributed Planning "A Multi-Agents Planning Architecture", Wilkins, AIPS-98
need another one here:contrast this (multi-agent, build one central plan w/ multi-agents building multiple interlinked plans)		 Yufeng
5/12 NO CLASS 
5/14 "Reasoning about multiple plans in dynamic multi-agent domains (extended abstract)," Gratch
"Recipe Execution through continual planning in a hostile dynamic environment," Au		 Decker
5/19 Short Student Project Presentations
Feb 10, 1998
decker@cis.udel.edu