Abstract: To foster effective use of artificial intelligence planning and scheduling (P&S) systems in the real world, it is of great importance to both (a) broaden direct access to the technology for the end users and (b) significantly increase their trust in such technology. Automated P&S systems often bring solutions to the users that are neither ‘obvious’ nor immediately acceptable to them. This is because these tools directly reason on causal, temporal, and resource constraints; moreover, they employ resolution processes designed to optimize the solution with respect to non-trivial evaluation functions. Knowledge engineering environments aim at simplifying direct access to the technology for people other than the original system designers, while the integration of validation and verification (V&V) capabilities in such environments may potentially enhance the users’ trust in the technology. Somehow, V&V techniques may represent a complementary technology, with respect to P&S, that contributes to developing richer software environments to synthesize a new generation of robust problem-solving applications. The integration of V&V and P&S techniques in a knowledge engineering environment is the topic of this paper. In particular, it analyzes the use of state-of-the-art V&V technology to support knowledge engineering for a timeline-based planning system called MrSPOCK. The paper presents the application domain for which the automated solver has been developed, introduces the timeline-based planning ideas, and then describes the different possibilities to apply V&V to planning. Hence, it continues by describing the step of adding V&V functionalities around the specialized planner, MrSPOCK. New functionalities have been added to perform both model validation and plan verification. Lastly, a specific section describes the benefits as well as the performance of such functionalities.
Amedeo Cesta, Alberto Finzi, Simone Fratini, Andrea Orlandini, Enrico Tronci. 2010. Validation and verification issues in a timeline-based planning system. The Knowledge Engineering Review. 25: doi: 10.1017/S0269888910000160
Amedeo Cesta, Alberto Finzi, Simone Fratini, Andrea Orlandini, Enrico Tronci. 2010. Validation and verification issues in a timeline-based planning system. The Knowledge Engineering Review. 25: doi: 10.1017/S0269888910000160
Abstract: Abstract: To foster effective use of artificial intelligence planning and scheduling (P&S) systems in the real world, it is of great importance to both (a) broaden direct access to the technology for the end users and (b) significantly increase their trust in such technology. Automated P&S systems often bring solutions to the users that are neither ‘obvious’ nor immediately acceptable to them. This is because these tools directly reason on causal, temporal, and resource constraints; moreover, they employ resolution processes designed to optimize the solution with respect to non-trivial evaluation functions. Knowledge engineering environments aim at simplifying direct access to the technology for people other than the original system designers, while the integration of validation and verification (V&V) capabilities in such environments may potentially enhance the users’ trust in the technology. Somehow, V&V techniques may represent a complementary technology, with respect to P&S, that contributes to developing richer software environments to synthesize a new generation of robust problem-solving applications. The integration of V&V and P&S techniques in a knowledge engineering environment is the topic of this paper. In particular, it analyzes the use of state-of-the-art V&V technology to support knowledge engineering for a timeline-based planning system called MrSPOCK. The paper presents the application domain for which the automated solver has been developed, introduces the timeline-based planning ideas, and then describes the different possibilities to apply V&V to planning. Hence, it continues by describing the step of adding V&V functionalities around the specialized planner, MrSPOCK. New functionalities have been added to perform both model validation and plan verification. Lastly, a specific section describes the benefits as well as the performance of such functionalities.
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Acknowledgments
Cesta, Fratini, Orlandini, and Tronci are partially supported by the EU project ULISSE (Call ‘SPA.2007.2.1.01 Space Science’. Contract FP7.218815). Cesta and Fratini are also partially supported by European Space Agency (ESA) within the Advanced Planning and Scheduling Initiative (APSI). Thanks to Riccardo Rasconi for help in proofreading the paper.
The interested reader may find a spectrum of approaches in the VVPS workshop series at ICAPS-05 and ICAPS-09.
In CTL (see Clarke et al., 1999), A means ‘along All paths’ (Inevitably), E means ‘along at least (there Exists) one path’, G means ‘has to hold on the entire subsequent path’ (Globally), F means ‘eventually has to hold somewhere on the subsequent path’ (Finally).
All experimental results presented in this section were collected by running tests on a Linux workstation endowed with a 64-bit AMD Athlon CPU (3.5 GHz) and 2GB RAM.
Amedeo Cesta, Alberto Finzi, Simone Fratini, Andrea Orlandini, Enrico Tronci. 2010. Validation and verification issues in a timeline-based planning system. The Knowledge Engineering Review. 25: doi: 10.1017/S0269888910000160
Amedeo Cesta, Alberto Finzi, Simone Fratini, Andrea Orlandini, Enrico Tronci. 2010. Validation and verification issues in a timeline-based planning system. The Knowledge Engineering Review. 25: doi: 10.1017/S0269888910000160
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Amedeo Cesta, Alberto Finzi, Simone Fratini, Andrea Orlandini, Enrico Tronci. 2010. Validation and verification issues in a timeline-based planning system. The Knowledge Engineering Review. 25: doi: 10.1017/S0269888910000160
Amedeo Cesta, Alberto Finzi, Simone Fratini, Andrea Orlandini, Enrico Tronci. 2010. Validation and verification issues in a timeline-based planning system. The Knowledge Engineering Review. 25: doi: 10.1017/S0269888910000160
