A course at ESSAI 2023, July 24-28, 2023, Ljubljana, Slovenia (Location: Room  PD)

Foundations of Automated Planning

by Roman Barták

Course Description:

Automating Planning is one of core areas of Artificial Intelligence. It is a knowledge-based approach that exploits a formal model of the problem and uses search techniques to explore alternatives how to achieve a goal. Thanks to formal background, automated planning contributes to trustworthy and explainable AI as the models can be used to explain and to verify the plans. Opposite to reactive techniques, automated planning reasons on future and how an agent can influence it to achieve own goals. Planning is hence an important capability of rational agents.

Planning is the reasoning part of acting. It deals with selecting and organizing actions to achieve a given goal. The course introduces automated planning, starting with a formal logical model of planning tasks, through core planning techniques (state-space and plan-space search, planning graph and reduction-based techniques), till exploiting control knowledge and relation to scheduling and execution.

Related tutorials:

  

Course Syllabus:

  1. Introduction: 
    core concepts, formalization of planning problems, applications.
  2. Planning techniques: 
    state space planning, plan space planning.
  3. Planning techniques: 
    planning graph and Graphplan, compilation of planning to SAT/CSP.
  4. Planning with time and resources: 
    modelling time, scheduling.
  5. Control knowledge in planning: 
    heuristics, control rules, hierarchical task networks.

About the Author

roman
 Roman Barták works as a full professor and a researcher at Charles University, Prague (Czech Republic), where he leads Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization Research Group. His research work focuses on techniques of constraint satisfaction and modeling and their application to planning, scheduling, and other areas.