ECAI 2004 Conference Paper

[full paper]

Planning with Numeric Variables in Multiobjective Planning

Antonio Garrido, Derek Long

Purely propositional representation traditionally used to express AI planning problems is not adequate to express numeric variables when modeling real-world continuous resources, such as fuel consumption, energy level, etc. This paper presents a heuristic planning approach that uses a richer representation with capabilities for numeric variables, including duration on actions, and multiobjective optimisation. This approach consists of two stages. First, a spike construction process estimates the values of the variables associated to propositions/actions. Unlike other approaches, we do not relax numeric effects in the calculus of the estimation, but only numeric conditions. Second, a heuristic search process generates a relaxed plan according to the estimations of the first stage, and then performs search in a plan space. The relaxed plan and the heuristic estimations help the process find a plan while trying to optimise the multiobjective criterion.

Keywords: Multiobjective planning, Planning with resources, Temporal planning, Planning

Citation: Antonio Garrido, Derek Long: Planning with Numeric Variables in Multiobjective Planning. In R.López de Mántaras and L.Saitta (eds.): ECAI2004, Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2004, pp.662-666.