Casual reasoning in planning1

Reasoning about actions necessarily involves tracking the truth of assertions about the world over time. The SIPE planning system retains the efficiency of the STRIPS assumption for this while enhancing expressive power by allowing the specification of a causl theory. Separation of knowledge about causality from knowledge about actions relieves operators of much of their representational burden and allows them to be applicable in a wide range of contexts. The implementation of causal theories is described, together with examples and evaluations of the system's expressive power and efficiency.     

Localized event-based reasoning for multiagent domain1

This paper presents the GEM concurrency model and GEMPLAN, a multiagent planner based on this model. Unlike standard state-based AI representations, GEM is unique in its explicit emphasis on events and domain structure. In particular, a world domain is modeled as a set of regions composed of interrelated events. Event-based temporal-logic constraints are then associated with each region to delimit legal domain behavior. The GEMPLAN planner directly reflects this emphasis on domain structure and constraints. It can be viewed as a general-purpose constraint satisfaction facility which constructs a network of interrelated events (a “plan”) that is subdivided into regions (“subplans”), satisfies all applicable regional constraints, and also achieves some stated goal. GEMPLAN extends and generalizes previous planning architectures in the range of constraint forms it handles and in the flexibility of its constraint satisfaction search strategy. One critical aspect of our work has been an emphasis on localized reasoning—techniques that make explicit use of domain structure. For example, GEM localizes the applicability of domain constraints and imposes additional “locality constraints” on the basis of domain structure. Together, constraint localization and locality constraints provide semantic information that can be used to alleviate several aspects of the frame problem for multiagent domains. The GEMPLAN planner reflects the use of locality by subdividing its constraint satisfaction search space into regional planning search spaces. Utilizing constraint and property localization, GEMPLAN can pinpoint and rectify interactions among these regional search spaces, thus reducing the burden of “interaction analysis” ubiquitous to most planning systems. Because GEMPLAN is specifically geared towards parallel, multiagent domains, we believe that its natural application areas will include scheduling and other forms of organizational coordination.     

Expressiveness and tractability in knowledge representation and reasoning1

A fundamental computational limit on automated reasoning and its effect on knowledge representation is examined. Basically, the problem is that it can be more difficult to reason correctly with one representational language than with another and, moreover, that this difficulty increases dramatically as the expressive power of the language increases. This leads to a tradeoff between the expressiveness of a representational language and its computational tractability. Here we show that this tradeoff can be seen to underlie the differences among a number of existing representational formalisms, in addition to motivating many of the current research issues in knowledge representation.     

Constraint satisfaction algorithms1

Constraint satisfaction problems are ubiquitous in artificial intelligence and many algorithms have been developed for their solution. This paper provides a unified survey of some of these, in terms of three classes: (i) tree search, (ii) arc consistency (AC), and (iii) hybrid tree search/arc consistency algorithms. It is shown that several important algorithms, when slightly rearranged, are of the latter hybrid form, but with arc consistency components that do not necessarily achieve full arc consistency at the tree nodes. Accordingly, we define several new partial AC procedures, AC1/5, AC1/4, AC1/3, and AC½, analogous to the well-known full AC algorithms which Mackworth has called AC1, AC2, and AC3. The fractional suffixes on our AC algorithms are roughly proportional to the degree of partial arc consistency they achieve. Unlike traditional versions, our AC algorithms (full and partial) are presented in a parameterized form to allow them to be embedded efficiently at the nodes of a tree search process. Algorithm complexities are compared empirically, using the n-queens problem and a new version called confused n-queens. Gaschnig's Backmarking (a tree search algorithm) and Haralick's Forward Checking (a hybrid algorithm) are found to be the most efficient. For the hybrid algorithms, we find that it pays to do little arc consistency processing at the nodes, incurring more nodes, but sufficiently reducing the work per node so as to obtain less work over the whole tree. The unified view taken here suggests several new algorithms. Preliminary results show one of these to be the best algorithm so far.