ITR: Modeling Domain Independent Planning to Advance Application

该项目将通过开发确定在各种条件下哪种规划器工作良好的方法，为自动规划领域做出贡献。它将构建一个元规划器，能够在一组域上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域。基于最初的研究结果，将开发计划器性能的预测模型，将问题和领域特征转换为估计给定计划器解决问题需要多少时间。反过来，这些模型将在元规划器中进行操作。这项工作有三个步骤：1)收集和开发应用程序和现实领域，以组装一组具有挑战性的基准问题；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。规划是任何复杂的人类活动的基础，从组织繁忙的生活到运营大型航空公司或测试大型软件系统。在每种情况下，人们都需要跟踪大量的细节，整理资源，并确保及时采取必要的行动来实现他们的目标。然而，自动化计划对如何实际完成计划几乎没有影响。这项研究试图通过新的方法来决定哪个计划者适合给定的任务，从而改善这种情况。metplanner既可以用于学习计划的人，也可以用于不知道哪种计划最适合他们的应用程序的新应用程序开发人员。

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.