ITR: Modeling Domain Independent Planning to Advance Application

该项目将通过开发方法来确定哪些计划器在各种条件下工作得很好，从而为自动计划领域做出贡献。它将构建一个元规划器，能够在一系列领域测试现有和混合规划器的性能，特别是比以前常用的更现实的领域。根据初步研究的结果，将开发计划员绩效的预测模型，将问题和领域特征转换为对给定计划员需要多少时间来解决问题的估计。反过来，这些模型将在元规划器中运行。这项工作分为三个步骤：1)收集和开发应用程序和现实领域，以组装具有挑战性的基准问题集；2)对几个最先进的规划器的性能进行建模；3)开发一个由模型指导的元规划器，以选择一个规划器来解决特定领域的问题。计划是任何复杂的人类努力的基础，从组织忙碌的生活到运营大型航空公司或测试大型软件系统。在每一种情况下，人们都需要跟踪大量的细节，调度资源，并确保能够及时采取必要的行动来实现他们的目标。然而，自动化计划对实际如何完成计划几乎没有什么影响。这项研究试图通过新的方法来改善这种情况，以确定哪一位计划员适合特定的任务。元规划器既可供学习规划的人使用，也可供可能不知道哪个规划器最适合其应用程序的新应用程序开发人员使用。

This project will contribute to the field of automatic planning by developing methods to determine what planner works well under various sets of conditions. It will construct a metaplanner that will be able to test performance of existing and hybridized planners on a suite of domains, especially more realistic domains than have been used commonly before. Based on the results of initial studies, predictive models of planner performance will be developed that translate problem and domain features to estimates of how much time would be needed by a given planner to solve the problem. The models, in turn, will be operationalized in the metaplanner. There are three steps to the work: 1) collect and develop applications and realistic domains to assemble a challenging benchmark set of problems; 2) modeling the performance of several state of the art planners, and 3) developing a metaplanner which is directed by the models to select a planner to solve problems in a particular domain. Planning underlies any complex human endeavor, from organizing a busy life to operating a large airline or testing large software systems. In each case, people need to track an enormous number of details, marshal resources and ensure that actions necessary to achieve their goals can be taken in a timely matter. However, automated planning has had little effect on how planning is actually accomplished. This research seeks to improve that situation through new methods to decide which planner is appropriate for a given task. The metaplanner can be used by both people learning about planning and new application developers who may not know which planner would be best for their application.