Recent Advances in AI Planning

TheEuropeanConferencesonPlanning(ECP)areamajorforumforthepres- tation of new research in Arti?cial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling. They developed from a series of European workshops and became successfully es- blished as international meetings. Previous conferences took place in St. Au- stin (Germany) in 1991, Vadstena (Sweden) in 1993, Assisi (Italy) in 1995, and Toulouse (France) in 1997. ECP-99 was held in Durham, United Kingdom. The conference received s- missions from all over Europe, from the US, Canada, South America, and New Zealand. This volume contains the 27 papers that were presented at the conference. They cover a variety of aspects in current AI Planning and Scheduling. Several p- minent planning paradigms are represented, including planning as satis?ability andothermodelcheckingstrategies,planningasheuristicstate-spacesearch,and Graphplan-Based approaches. Moreover, various new scheduling approaches and combinations of planning and scheduling methods are introduced. Inadditiontotheconferencepapers,threeinvitedtalkswerepresentedbydist- guished researchers of the ?eld: Fausto Giunchiglia (IRST Trento, Italy) gave an introduction to Planning as Model Checking. The corresponding paper by F- sto Giunchiglia and Paolo Traverso is included in this volume. Claude Le Pape (BouyguesTelecom,France)presentedConstraint-BasedScheduling:Theoryand Applications, and Nicola Muscettola (NASA Ames, USA) talked aboutPlanning at 96 Million Kilometers from Earth. ECP-99 received support fromPLANET,the European Network of Excellence in AI Planning, the University of Durham, United Kingdom, and the University of Ulm, Germany.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt
Planning as Model Checking.- Conformant Planning via Model Checking.- Strong Cyclic Planning Revisited.- Scaleability in Planning.- Exploiting Competitive Planner Performance.- A Parallel Algorithm for POMDP Solution.- Plan Merging & Plan Reuse as Satisfiability.- SAT-Based Procedures for Temporal Reasoning.- Numeric State Variables in Constraint-Based Planning.- Hierarchical Task Network Planning as Satisfiability.- Exhibiting Knowledge in Planning Problems to Minimize State Encoding Length.- Action Constraints for Planning.- Least Commitment on Variable Binding in Presence of Incomplete Knowledge.- Scaling up Planning by Teasing Out Resource Scheduling.- Real-Time Scheduling for Multi-agent Call Center Automation.- Task Decomposition Support to Reactive Scheduling.- Greedy Algorithms for the Multi-capacitated Metric Scheduling Problem.- Automata-Theoretic Approach to Planning for Temporally Extended Goals.- Integer Programs and Valid Inequalities for Planning Problems.- Deductive Synthesis of Recursive Plans in Linear Logic.- Sensor Planning with Non-linear Utility Functions.- Propice-Plan: Toward a Unified Framework for Planning and Execution.- What is the Expressive Power of Disjunctive Preconditions?.- Some Results on the Complexity of Planning with Incomplete Information.- Probabilistic Planning in the Graphplan Framework.- Making Graphplan Goal-Directed.- GRT: A Domain Independent Heuristic for STRIPS Worlds Based on Greedy Regression Tables.- Planning as Heuristic Search: New Results.