Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Informatik
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Rules are an important knowledge representation formalism in constructive problem solving. On the other hand, object orientation is an essential key technology for maintaining large knowledge bases as well as software applications. Trying to take advantage of the benefits of both paradigms, we integrated Prolog and Smalltalk to build a common base architecture for problem solving. This approach has proven to be useful in the development of two knowledge-based systems for planning and configuration design (CAPlan and Idax). Both applications use Prolog as an efficient computational source for the evaluation of knowledge represented as rules.
Problem specifications for classical planners based on a STRIPS-like representation typically consist of an initial situation and a partially defined goal state. Hierarchical planning approaches, e.g., Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) Planning, have not only richer representations for actions but also for the representation of planning problems. The latter are defined by giving an initial state and an initial task network in which the goals can be ordered with respect to each other. However, studies with a specification of the domain of process planning for the plan-space planner CAPlan (an extension of SNLP) have shown that even without hierarchical domain representation typical properties called goal orderings can be identified in this domain that allow more efficient and correct case retrieval strategies for the case-based planner CAPlan/CbC. Motivated by that, this report describes an extension of the classical problem specifications for plan-space planners like SNLP and descendants. These extended problem specifications allow to define a partial order on the planning goals which can interpreted as an order in which the solution plan should achieve the goals. These goal ordering can theoretically and empirically be shown to improve planning performance not only for case-based but also for generative planning. As a second but different way we show how goal orderings can be used to address the control problem of partial order planners. These improvements can be best understood with a refinement of Barrett's and Weld's extended taxonomy of subgoal collections.
Real world planning tasks like manufacturing process planning often don't allow to formalize all of the relevant knowledge. Especially, preferences between alternatives are hard to acquire but have high influence on the efficiency of the planning process and the quality of the solution. We describe the essential features of the CAPlan planning architecture that supports cooperative problem solving to narrow the gap caused by absent preference and control knowledge. The architecture combines an SNLP-like base planner with mechanisms for explict representation and maintenance of dependencies between planning decisions. The flexible control interface of CAPlan allows a combination of autonomous and interactive planning in which a user can participate in the problem solving process. Especially, the rejection of arbitrary decisions by a user or dependency-directed backtracking mechanisms are supported by CAPlan.
This report presents the properties of a specification of the domain of process planning for rotary symmetrical workpieces. The specification results from a model for problem solving in this domain that involves different reasoners, one of which is an AI planner that achieves goals corresponding to machining workpieces by considering certain operational restrictions of the domain. When planning with SNLP (McAllester and Rosenblitt, 1991), we will show that the resulting plans have the property of minimizing the use of certain key operations. Further, we will show that, for elastic protected plans (Kambhampati et al., 1996) such as the ones produced by SNLP, the goals corresponding to machining parts of a workpiece are OE-constrained trivial serializable, a special form of trivial serializability (Barrett and Weld, 1994). However, we will show that planning with SNLP in this domain can be very difficult: elastic protected plans for machining parts of a workpiece are nonmergeable. Finally, we will show that, for sufix, prefix or sufix and prefix plans such as the ones produced by state-space planners, it is not possible to have both properties, being OEconstrained trivial serializable and minimizing the use of the key operations, at the same time.
The common wisdom that goal orderings can be used to improve planning performance is nearly as old as planning itself. During the last decades of research several approaches emerged that computed goal orderings for different planning paradigms, mostly in the area of state-space planning. For partial-order, plan-space planners goal orderings have not been investigated in much detail. Mechanisms developed for statespace planning are not directly applicable because partial-order planners do not have a current (world) state. Further, it is not completely clear how plan-space planners should make use of goal orderings. This paper describes an approach to extract goal orderings to be used by the plan-space planner CAPlan. The extraction of goal orderings is based on the analysis of an extended version of operator graphs which previously have been found useful for the analysis of interactions and recursion of plan-space planners.
Planning for manufacturing workpieces is a complex task that requires the interaction of a domain-specific reasoner and a generic planning mechanism. In this paper we present an architecture for organizing the case base that is based on the information provided by a generic problem solver. A retrieval procedure is then presented that uses the information provided by the domain-specific reasoner in order to improve the accuracy of the cases retrieved. However, it is not realistic to suppose that the case retrieved will entirely fit into the new problem. We present a replay procedure to obtain a partial solution that replays not only the valid decisions taken for solving the case, but also justifications of rejected decisions made during the problem solving process. As a result, those completion alternatives of the partial solution are discarded that are already known to be invalid from the case.
Complete Eager Replay
(1996)
We present an algorithm for completely replaying previous problem solving experiences for plan-space planners. In our approach not only the solution trace is replayed, but also the explanations of failed attempts made by the first-principle planner. In this way, the capability of refitting previous solutions into new problems is improved.
Retrieving multiple cases is supposed to be an adequate retrieval strategy for guiding partial-order planners because of the recognized flexibility of these planners to interleave steps in the plans. Cases are combined by merging them. In this paper, we will examine two different kinds of merging cases in the context of partial-order planning. We will see that merging cases can be very difficult if the cases are merged eagerly. On the other hand, if cases are merged by avoiding redundant steps, the guidance of the additional cases tends to decrease with the number of covered goals and retrieved cases in domains having a certain kind of interactions. Thus, to retrieve a single case covering many of the goals of the problem or to retrieve fewer cases covering many of the goals is at least equally effective as to retrieve several cases covering all goals in these domains.
This paper shows an approach to profit from type information about planning objects in a partial-order planner. The approach turns out to combine representational and computational advantages. On the one hand, type hierarchies allow better structuring of domain specifications. On the other hand, operators contain type constraints which reduce the search space of the planner as they partially achieve the functionality of filter conditions.