CS 541: Artificial Intelligence Planning

            Instructors: Craig Knoblock and Jim Blythe

        Meeting Time: Monday and Wednesday, 1 - 2:15 pm

        Location: VHE 210

            Planning has been an area of research in Artificial Intelligence for over two decades. It is concerned with the synthesis of sequences of actions (plans) that can be used by agents to achieve their desired goals. Planning involves the representation of actions and world models, reasoning about the effects of actions, and techniques for efficiently searching the space of possible plans. Planning has been used to automate a variety of tasks including robotic control, process planning, information gathering, transportation planning, experiment planning in molecular genetics, and spacecraft mission sequencing.

            This course will focus on the basic foundations and techniques in planning and survey a wide variety of planning systems. The class will be run as a lecture course with lots of hands-on experience with state-of-the-art planning systems. The topics covered in the course will include:
 

            Prerequisites: CS561 -- Introduction to AI
           Grading:          Grades will be based on homeworks, quizzes, exams, a course project, and class  participation.
           Office Hours: immediately after class or by appointment, contact Craig Knoblock at  knoblock@isi.edu  or Jim Blythe at  blythe@isi.edu

            Student responsibilities in the class will consist of the following:
 

            · Building a simple planning system.

            · Writing a new domain for an existing planner.

            · Anything else that you can convince us would make an interesting project.


 

  Course Syllabus and Schedule

            The list of core readings and optional related material will be maintained on this page, so watch here for updates.
 
           Introduction -- Sept 2 (Blythe)

 
            Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig,
            Prentice Hall, 1995, chapter 11.

 
            Real-World Planning Problems
            Action and Plan Representation
            Historical Overview

    PLANNING APPROACHES

 
            Generative Planning -- Sept 9 (Knoblock)

 
            Earl D. Sacerdoti, The Nonlinear Nature of Plans,

                      James Allen, James Hendler, and Austin Tate, editors. Readings in Planning.
                      Morgan Kaufmann, 1990.

                     David Chapman, Planning for Conjunctive Goals,
                     James Allen, James Hendler, and Austin Tate, editors. Readings in Planning.
                     Morgan Kaufmann, 1990.

             Causal-Link Planning -- Sept 14 (Blythe)
 

            Dan Weld. An introduction to least commitment planning,
            AI Magazine, Summer/Fall 1994
            (postscript), UCpop home page

 
            Unified Framework -- Sept 16 (Knoblock)

 
            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, 76(1-2), 1995.
 
            Hierarchical Task Network Planning, -- Sept 21 (Blythe)

 
            Austin Tate, "Generating project networks",

                      James Allen, James Hendler, and Austin Tate, editors. Readings in Planning.
            Morgan Kaufmann, 1990.

 
            Subbarao Kambhampati, "A comparative analysis of partial order planning and task reduction
            planning",  SIGART Bulletin, Vol. 6 No. 1
            (postscript)

 
            Graphplan -- Sept 23 (Knoblock)

 
           Avrim Blum and Merrick Furst, "Fast planning through planning graph analysis",
           Artifical Intelligence, vol. 90, 1997

 
            B. Cenk Gazen and Craig A. Knoblock,
            "Combining the expressivity of UCPOP with the efficiency of Graphplan",
            Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Planning, Toulouse, France, 1997

 
            Planning as Constraint Satisfaction -- Sept 28 (Blythe)

 
            Qiang Yang, "A theory of conflict resolution in planning",
            Artificial Intelligence, 1992

 
             David Joslin and Martha Pollack, "Is 'early commitment' in plan generation ever a good idea?"
             Thirteenth National Conference on Artifical Intelligence, Portland, Oregon, 1996

 
            Planning as Satisfiability -- Sept 30 (Knoblock)

 
            Henry Kautz and Bart Selman.
            Pushing the envelope: Planning, propositional logic, and stochastic search.
            In Proceedings of theThirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 1194-1201,

                      Portland, OR, 1996.
 
            Henry Kautz and Bart Selman.
            Blackbox: A new approach to the application of theorem proving to problem solving.
            In Proceedings of the AIPS Workshop on Planning as Combinatorial Search, Pittsburgh, PA, 1998.

 
            Reactive Systems -- Oct 5 (Blythe)

 
            Thomas Dean and Mark Boddy, "An analysis of time-dependent planning", AAAI 88

 
            PRS (Georgeff and Lansky)
            James Allen, James Hendler, and Austin Tate, editors. Readings in Planning.
            Morgan Kaufmann, 1990.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

             New Approaches -- Oct 7 (Knoblock)
 

            Fahiem Bacchus and Yee Whye Teh.  Making Forward Chaining Relevant.
            In Proceedings of the Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems, Pittsburgh, PA, 1998

 
            Jose Luis Ambite and Craig A. Knoblock.
            Planning by Rewriting: Efficiently Generating High-Quality Plans.
            Proceedings of AAAI-97, Providence, Rhode Island, 1997.

 

   CONTROLLING SEARCH

 
            Planning Complexity -- Oct 12 (Blythe)

 
            David Joslin and John Roach, "A theoretical analysis of conjunctive-goal problems",
            Artificial Intelligence, Volume 41, Issue 1, November 1989

 
            Tom Bylander, "Complexity results for extended planning",
             First international conference on AI planning systems, Maryland, 1992

 
            Abstraction and Hierarchical Planning -- Oct 14 (Knoblock)

 
            Craig A. Knoblock. Search reduction in hierarchical problem solving.
            In Proceedings of the Ninth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence,
            pages 686-691, Anaheim, CA, 1991.

 
            Craig A. Knoblock. Automatically generating abstractions for planning.
           Artificial Intelligence, 68(2),1994.

 
            Case-based Planning -- Oct 19 (Blythe)

 
              Manuela Veloso. "Prodigy/Analogy: analogical reasoning in general problem-solving"
               In "Topics in case-based reasoning", 1994
            postscript

 
              Laurie Ihrig and Subbarao Kambhampati.
              "Design and implementation of a replay framework based on a partial-order planner"
            postscript

 
            Skeletal, Macros and Abstraction -- Oct 21 (Knoblock)

 
            Richard Korf, Planning as Search: a Quantitative Approach, Artificial
            Intelligence, Vol 33, 1987.

 
            Postponing Commitment -- Oct 26 (Blythe)

 
            David Joslin and Martha Pollack. "Least-cost flaw repair",
            Twelfth national conference on artificial intelligence, Seattle, 1994
            postscript

 
            Peter Stone, Manuela Veloso and Jim Blythe,
            "The need for different domain-independent heuristics",
            Second international conference on AI planning systems, Chicago, 1994
            postscript

 
            Learning Control Rules -- Oct 28 (Knoblock)

 
            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.

 
             Suresh Katukam and Subbarao Kambhampati.  Learning Explanation-based Search
            Control Rules for Partial Order Planning.  Proceedings of AAAI-94, 1994.

 
            Subbarao Kambhampati.  EBL and DDB for Graphplan.  Technical Report ASU CSE
            TR 98-008, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Arizona State
            University, 1998.

 

  INTERACTING WITH THE ENVIRONMENT

 
            Incomplete Information and Conditional Planning -- Nov 2 (Blythe)

 
     Here are  handouts from a lecture to the AI undergrad class at CMU on probabilistic planning,
     which you may find useful background for the topics of the next few weeks.

 
            Denise Draper, Steve Hanks and Dan Weld.
            "Probabilistic planning with information gathering and contingent execution"
            Second international conference on AI planning systems, Chicago, 1994
            postscript

 
            Jim Blythe and Manuela Veloso. "Analogical replay for efficient conditional planning"
            Proceedings of AAAI-97, Providence, Rhode Island, 1997.
            postscript

 
            Planning and Execution -- Nov 4 (Knoblock)

 
            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.

 
            Keith Golden, Oren Etzioni, and Daniel Weld.  Planning with Execution and
            Incomplete Information.  Technical Report UW-CSE-96-01-09.  Department of
            Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, 1996.

 

 

            Probabilistic Planning -- Nov 9 (Blythe)

 
            Nicholas Kushmerick, Steve Hanks and Dan Weld.
            "An algorithm for probabilistic least-commitment planning",
            Proceedings of AAAI-94, Seattle, Washington.
            postscript

 
            Stephen Majercik and Michael Littman. "MAXPLAN: a new approach to probabilistic planning"
            Proceedings of AIPS-98, Pittsburgh, PA, 1998
            postscript

 

  EXTENDING THE REPRESENTATION

 
            Temporal Planning -- Nov 11 (Knoblock)

 
S.A. Vere.  Planning in Time:Windows and Durations for Activities and
Goals.  Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 5, 1983.

 
J. Scott Penberthy and Daniel S. Weld. Temporal planning with continuous
change. In Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, pages 1010-1015, Seattle, WA, 1994.

 

 

            Exogenous Events -- Nov 16 (Blythe)

 
            Jim Blythe. "Event-based decompositions for reasoning about external change in planners"
            Proceedings of AIPS-96, Edinburgh UK, 1996.
            postscript , and the Prodigy home page

 
            Murray Shanahan. "Representing continuous change in the event calculus",
            Proceedings of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1990
            postscript

, and
 
            Decision Theory -- Nov 18 (Knoblock)

 

 

Thomas Dean, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Jak Kirman, and Ann Nicholson.
Planning with Deadlines in Stochastic Domains,  Proceedings of AAAI-93.
1993.

 
Craig Boutilier, Ronen I. Brafman, and Christopher Geib.  Prioritized Goal
Decomposition of Markov Decision Processes: Toward a Synthesis of Classical
and Decision Theoretic Planning.  Proceedings of IJCAI-97, 1997.

 

  PLANNING APPLICATIONS

 
            NASA Planning Applications -- Nov 23 (Steve Chien)

 
             S. Chien, D. DeCoste, R. Doyle, and P. Stolorz,

                       "Making an Impact: Artificial Intelligence at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory",
                       AI Magazine 18 (1):Spring 1997, pp. 103-122.
                       (available for download to AAAI members at http://www.aaai.org/)
                      JPL Planning and scheduling page
 
 
           Planning for Software Agents -- Nov 25 (Knoblock)

 
            Oren Etzioni and Daniel S. Weld. A softbot-based interface to the Internet.
Communications of the ACM, 37(7), 1994.

 
Craig A. Knoblock. Planning, executing, sensing, and replanning for
information gathering. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Joint
Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Montreal, Canada, 1995.

 
Stephen J.J. Smith, Dana Nau, and Tom Throop.  Computer Bridge: A Big Win
for AI Planning, AI Magazine, Summer 1998.

 

 

            Process Planning and Robot Planning -- Nov 30 (Blythe)

 
            Dana Nau, Satyandra Gupta and William Regli,
            "AI planning vs manufacturing-operation planning: a case study"
            Proceedings of IJCAI 95
            postscript and Dana Nau's home page

 
            Dirk Hahnel, Wolfram Burgard and Gerhard Lakemeyer,
            "GOLEX - bridging the gap between logic (GOLOG) and a real robot"
            German AI conference, 1998
            postscript (warning: 6 megabyte file) and  the Rhino page

 
             Learning from the Environment -- Dec 2 (Yolanda Gil)

 
            Yolanda Gil. Learning by experimentation: Incremental refinement of
incomplete planning domains. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International
     Conference on Machine Learning, New Brunswick, NJ, 1994.

 
           Project Presentations, Dec 7 & 9

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

   The final exam will be handed out on Dec 9 and will be due at 5pm on Dec 16, by email to one of the instructors.