André A. Ciré

ICAPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Relaxed BDDs: An Admissible Heuristic for Delete-Free Planning Based on a Discrete Relaxation

• Margarita P. Castro
• Chiara Piacentini
• André A. Ciré
• J. Christopher Beck

We investigate the use of relaxed binary decision diagrams (BDDs) as an alternative to linear programming (LP) for computing an admissible heuristic for the cost-optimal delete-free planning (DFP) problem. Our main contributions are the introduction of a novel BDD encoding, a construction algorithm for the sequential relaxation of a DFP task and a study of the effectiveness of relaxed BDD heuristics, both from a theoretical and practical perspective. We further show that relaxed BDDs can be used beyond heuristic computation to extract delete-free plans, find action landmarks, and identify redundant actions. Our empirical analysis shows that while BDD-based heuristics trail the state of the art, even small relaxed BDDs are competitive with the LP heuristic for the DFP task.

ICAPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Compiling Optimal Numeric Planning to Mixed Integer Linear Programming

• Chiara Piacentini
• Margarita P. Castro
• André A. Ciré
• J. Christopher Beck

Compilation techniques in planning reformulate a problem into an alternative encoding for which efficient, off-the-shelf solvers are available. In this work, we present a novel mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) compilation for cost-optimal numeric planning with instantaneous actions. While recent works on the problem are restricted to actions that modify variables present in simple numeric conditions, our MILP formulation, in addition, handles linear conditions and linear action effects on numeric state variables. Such problems are particularly challenging due to the state-dependency of the action effects. Experiments show that our approach, in addition to being the state of the art for the more general problem class, is competitive with heuristic search-based planners on domains with only simple numeric conditions.

ECAI Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Mathematical Programming Models for Optimizing Partial-Order Plan Flexibility

• Buser Say
• André A. Ciré
• J. Christopher Beck

A partial-order plan (POP) compactly encodes a set of sequential plans that can be dynamically chosen by an agent at execution time. One natural measure of the quality of a POP is its flexibility, which is defined to be the total number of sequential plans it embodies (i. e. , its linearizations). As this criteria is hard to optimize, existing work has instead optimized proxy functions that are correlated with the number of linearizations. In this paper, we develop and strengthen mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) models for three proxy functions: two from the POP literature and a third novel function based on the temporal flexibility criteria from the scheduling literature. We show theoretically and empirically that none of the three proxy measures dominate the others in terms of number of sequential plans. Compared to the state-of-the-art MaxSAT model for the problem, we empirically demonstrate that two of our MILP models result in equivalent or slightly better solution quality with savings of approximately one order of magnitude in computation time.

ICAPS Conference 2012 Conference Paper

MDD Propagation for Disjunctive Scheduling

• André A. Ciré
• Willem-Jan van Hoeve

Disjunctive scheduling is the problem of scheduling activities that must not overlap in time. Constraint-based techniques, such as edge finding and not first/not-last rules, have been a key element in successfully tackling large and complex disjunctive scheduling problems in recent years. In this work we investigate new propagation methods based on limited-width Multivalued Decision Diagrams (MDDs). We present theoretical properties of the MDD encoding and describe filtering and refinement operations that strengthen the relaxation it provides. Furthermore, we provide an efficient way to integrate the MDD-based reasoning with state-of-the-art propagation techniques for scheduling. Experimental results indicate that the MDD propagation can outperform existing domain filters especially when minimizing sequence dependent setup times, in certain cases by several orders of magnitude.

IJCAI Conference 2009 Conference Paper

• Adi Botea
• André A. Ciré

Planning with temporally extended goals and uncontrollable events has recently been introduced as a formal model for system reconfiguration problems. An important application is to automatically reconfigure a real-life system in such a way that its subsequent internal evolution is consistent with a temporal goal formula. In this paper we introduce an incremental search algorithm and a search-guidance heuristic, two generic planning enhancements. An initial problem is decomposed into a series of subproblems, providing two main ways of speeding up a search. Firstly, a subproblem focuses on a part of the initial goal. Secondly, a notion of action relevance allows to explore with higher priority actions that are heuristically considered to be more relevant to the subproblem at hand. Even though our techniques are more generally applicable, we restrict our attention to planning with temporally extended goals and uncontrollable events. Our ideas are implemented on top of a successful previous system that performs online learning to better guide planning and to safely avoid potentially expensive searches. In experiments, the system speed performance is further improved by a convincing margin.

ECAI Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Learning in Planning with Temporally Extended Goals and Uncontrollable Events

• André A. Ciré
• Adi Botea

Recent contributions to advancing planning from the classical model to more realistic problems include using temporal logic such as LTL to express desired properties of a solution plan. This paper introduces a planning model that combines temporally extended goals and uncontrollable events. The planning task is to reach a state such that all event sequences generated from that state satisfy the problem's temporally extended goal. A real-life application that motivates this work is to use planning to configure a system in such a way that its subsequent, non-deterministic internal evolution (nominal behavior) is guaranteed to satisfy a condition expressed in temporal logic.