Abstract
Planning consists of an action selection phase where actions are selected and ordered to reach the desired goals, and a resource allocation phase where enough resources are assigned to ensure the successful execution of the chosen actions. In most real-world problems, these two phases are loosely coupled. Most existing planners do not exploit this loose-coupling, and perform both action selection and resource assignment employing the same algorithm. We shall show that this strategy severely curtails the scale-up potential of existing planners, including such recent ones as Graphplan and Blackbox. In response, we propose a novel planning framework in which resource allocation is teased apart from planning, and is handled in a separate “scheduling” phase. We ignore resource constraints during planning and produce an abstract plan that can correctly achieve the goals but for the resource constraints. Next, based on the actual resource availability, the abstract plan will be allocated resources to produce an executable plan. Our approach not only preserves both the correctness as well as the quality (measured in length) of the plan but also improves efficiency. We describe a prototype implementation of our approach on top of Graphplan and show impressive empirical results.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Backstrom, C.: Computational Aspects of Reordering Plans. JAIR 9, 99–137 (1998)
Blum, A., Furst, M.: Fast planning through planning graph analysis. In: Proc. IJCAI 1995, pp. 1636–1642 (1995)
Cesta, A., Cristiano, S.: A Time and Resource Problem in Planning Architectures. In: Proc. ECP 1996 (1996)
Currie, K., Tate, A.: O-Plan: the open planning architecture. AI 52, 49–86 (1991)
Kautz, H., Selman, B.: BLACKBOX: A New Approach to the Application of Theorem Proving to Problem Solving. In: Workshop Planning as Combinatorial Search, AIPS 1998, Pittsburgh, PA (1998)
El-Kholy, A., Richards, B.: Temporal and Resource Reasoning in Planning: the parcPlan approach. In: Proc. ECAI 1996 (1996)
Kambhampati, S., Cutkoksy, M.R., Tenenbaum, J.M., Lee, S.: Integrating General Purpose Planners and Specialized Reasoners: Case Study of a Hybrid Planning Architecture. IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Special issue on Planning, Scheduling and Control 23(6) (November/December 1993) (An earlier version appears in Proc. AAAI-1991)
Kambhampati, S.: EBL and DDB for Graphplan. In: Proc. IJCAI 1999 (1999)
Knoblock, C.A.: Automatically Generating Abstractions for Planning. AI Journal 68(2) (1994)
Laborie, P., Ghallab, M.: Planning with sharable resource constraints. In: Proc. IJCAI 1995 (1995)
Fox, M., Long, D.: The Detection and Exploitation of Symmetry in Planning Domains. In: Proc. IJCAI 1999 (1999)
McAllester, D., Rosenblitt, D.: Systematic nonlinear planning. In: Proc. 9th NCAI 1991, pp. 634–639 (1991)
Nebel, B., Dimopoulos, Y., Koehler, J.: Ignoring irrelevant facts and operators in plan generation. In: Proc. ECP 1997 (1997)
Koehler, J., Nebel, B., Hoffmann, J., Dimopoulos, Y.: Extending Planning Graphs to an ADL Subset. In: Proc. ECP 1997 (1997)
Penberthy, J., Weld, D.: UCPOP: A sound, complete, partial order planner for ADL. In: Proc. AAAI 1994, pp. 103–114 (1994)
Wolfman, S., Weld, D.: The LPSAT Engine and its Application to Resource Planning. In: Proc. IJCAI 1999 (1994)
Wilkins, D.E.: Practical planning: Extending the classical AI planning paradigm. Morgan Kaufmann Pub., San Mateo (1988)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Srivastava, B., Kambhampati, S. (2000). Scaling up Planning by Teasing Out Resource Scheduling. In: Biundo, S., Fox, M. (eds) Recent Advances in AI Planning. ECP 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1809. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10720246_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10720246_14
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67866-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44657-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive