Validating Plans with Continuous Effects
Dr. Richard Howey (University of Durham (UK))
CSL SEMINAR SERIESDATE: 2003-08-12
TIME: 16:00:00 - 17:00:00
LOCATION: RSISE Seminar Room, ground floor, building 115, cnr. North and Daley Roads, ANU
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ABSTRACT:
In recent years research in the planning community has moved increasingly towards application of planners to realistic problems. This includes the extension of planning algorithms to handle numbers and domains temporal structure. For example, in the third International Planning Competition (held in 2002) planners addressed domains using time and numeric resources. A critical element in the use of PDDL2.1, the modelling language developed for the competition series, has been the common understanding of the semantics of the language and the fact that this has been implemented in plan validation software was vital to the progress of the competition. However, the validation of plans using actions with continuous effects presents new challenges (that precede the challenges presented by planning with those effects). In this talk I review the need for continuous effects, their semantics and the problems that arise in validation of plans that include them. I then go on to report the progress in implementing the semantics in an extended version of the plan validation software.
BIO:
Dr Howey got his PhD from Newcastle university in an area of pure mathematics known as functional analysis. He then moved on to be a research associate in the area of AI planning at the university of Durham, where he has worked on the automatic valiation tool used in the 3rd International Planning Competition and extended it to include durative actions with continuous effects. Dr Howey will be visiting the CSL from August 11 to August 22.
