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A resource enhanced HTN planning approach for emergency decision-making

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Abstract

Hierarchical resource reasoning is one of the key issues to successfully apply Hierarchy Task Network (HTN) planning into emergency decision-making. This paper proposes a Resource Enhanced HTN (REHTN) planning approach for emergency decision-making with the objective to enhance the expressive power and improve the processing speed of hierarchical resource reasoning. In the approach, resource timelines are defined to describe various resource variables and constraints. Top-down resource reasoning is used for decomposing the resource constraints of upper-level tasks into those of lower-level tasks. Meanwhile, resource and temporal constraints of tasks in different branches are processed by causal links. After the tasks are decomposed into primitive tasks, resource profiles of consumable resources and reusable resources are checked by separate resource allocation processes. Furthermore, a constraint propagation accelerator is designed to speed up hierarchal resource reasoning. The effectiveness and practicability of REHTN are confirmed with some experiments from emergency logistics distribution problems.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Mr. Jingjing Li for the domain knowledge modeling of emergency logistics distribution problem. We would also like to express our thanks to Dr. Yongchang Wei and Dr. Pan Tang for numerous discussions of this paper. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Grant of China, projects No. 90924301, No. 91024032 and No. 71125001.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Systems Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

    Zhe Wang, Hong-Wei Wang, Chao Qi & Jian Wang

  2. Key Laboratory of Education Ministry of Image Processing and Intelligent Control, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

    Hong-Wei Wang

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  1. Zhe Wang
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  2. Hong-Wei Wang
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  3. Chao Qi
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  4. Jian Wang
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Correspondence to Hong-Wei Wang.

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Wang, Z., Wang, HW., Qi, C. et al. A resource enhanced HTN planning approach for emergency decision-making. Appl Intell 38, 226–238 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-012-0367-7

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