ITR: Decision-Theoretic Planning with Constraints

这笔赠款支持不确定情况下的建模和自动化决策的基础和应用研究。该项目正在开发用于获取、建模和管理复杂和概率信息的工具、基于这些信息构建模型的算法以及规划算法。这些都将应用于肯塔基州的福利工作计划和肯塔基大学的学术建议。开发的算法和软件将可用于其他领域。例如，给定工作福利提供的正式模型，以及法律要求、物流和个人客户的目标和偏好中固有的约束，计划算法和启发式算法会找到一个优化客户预期效用的计划。(在项目开始之前，给定项目中给定客户的结果永远不会确定。)该项目正在开发一套统一的工具，用于提取和获取概率信息，并在灵活高效的数据库管理系统中进行管理，开发一种形式主义和软件，用于得出约束、偏好和目标，以及同时考虑硬约束和软约束的规划算法。这些应用程序将使福利到工作系统中的客户和服务提供商以及肯塔基大学的学生参与确定他们自己的目标和偏好的过程，并进行规划，以确定这些目标和偏好是否可满足。这项工作将帮助他们争取最大的满足感。

This grant supports fundamental and applied research on modeling and automating decision making under uncertainty. The project is developing tools for eliciting, modeling, and managing complex and probabilistic information, algorithms for building models based on this information, and planning algorithms. These will all be applied to the Kentucky Welfare to Work program and to academic advising at the University of Kentucky. The algorithms and software developed will be available for use in other domains. Given formal models of, for instance, Welfare to Work's offerings and of the constraints inherent in legal requirements, logistics, and an individual client's goals and preferences, planning algorithms and heuristics find a plan that optimizes the client's expected utility. (The outcome for a given client in a given program is never certain before the program begins.)The project is developing a unified suite of tools for extracting and eliciting probabilistic information and managing it in a flexible and efficient database management system, a formalism and software for eliciting constraints, preferences and goals, and planning algorithms that take into account both hard and soft constraints.The applications will engage clients and service providers in the Welfare to Work system and students at the University of Kentucky in the processes of determining their own goals and preferences and in planning that will determine whether those goals and preferences are satisfiable. The work will help them strive for maximum satisfaction.