Research Proposal in Probabilistic Planning Search
Yazmin S. Villegas-Hernandez and Federico Guedea-Elizalde
Design and Technology Innovation Center, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico
Keywords:
Bayesian Networks, Planning, and Planning Search.
Abstract:
In planning search, there are different approaches to guide the search, where all of them are focused in have a
plan (solution) in less time. Most of the researches are not admissible heuristics, but they have good results in
time. For example, using the heuristic-search planning approach plans can be generated in less time than other
approaches, but the plans generated by all heuristic planners are sub-optimal, or could have dead ends (states
from which the goals get unreachable). We present an approach to guide the search in a probabilistic way in
order to do not have the problems of the not admissible approaches. We extended the Bayesian network and
Bayesian inferences ideas to our work. Furthermore, we present our way to make Bayesian inferences in order
to guide the search in a better way. The results of our experiments of our approach with different well-known
benchmarks are presented. The benchmarks used in our experiments are: Driverlog, Zenotravel, Satellite,
Rovers, and Freecell.
1 INTRODUCTION
In planning, there are four main approaches to in-
crease the efficiency of planning systems.
First, Blum and Furst developed a novel algorithm
called Graphplan (Blum and Furst, 1997). This al-
gorithm reduces the branching factor by searching in
a special data structure. Furthermore, this algorithm
searches for layered plans (parallel plans). This algo-
rithm has three limitations. First, Graphplan applies
only to STRIPS language (Fikes and Nilsson, 1994).
Second, this planner performs poorly without extra ad
hoc reasoning capabilities. Third, the most important
limitation of Graphplan is that the quality of the plan
is not as good as the speed of the planning of this
planner.
There are many planning systems that use the
Graphplan algorithm or their own version of this al-
gorithm as SGP (Weld et al., 1998), Blackbox (Kautz
and Selman, 1999), IPP (Koehler, 1999), Medic
(Ernst et al., 1997), STAN (Fox and Long, 2011),
FF (Hoffmann and Nebel, 2011) and others. Further-
more, there is the LPG (Local Search for Planning
Graphs) planner (Gerevini et al., 2003), which is the
only one that does not use the Graphplan algorithm
properly, but it still has a planning-graph approach.
Therefore, LPG works with heuristics that exploit the
structure of the planning graph.
Second, Kautz and Selman developed a novel
method for planning called planning as satisfiability
(SAT) (Kautz et al., 1992), which transforms plan-
ning problem into a propositional satisfiability prob-
lem for which efficient solvers are known. The SAT-
PLAN04 (Kautz, 2004) uses STRIPS language as
well as PDDL language (Fox and Long, 2003), but
SatPlan does not handle any non-STRIPS features
other than types, such as derived effects and condi-
tional actions.
Third, Bonet and Geffner developed a new ap-
proach based on heuristic-search planning (HSP)
(Bonet and Geffner, 2001). In this approach, a heuris-
tic is choosing among a set of different heuristics in
order to guide the search through the state space. Un-
fortunately, the heuristics used in this algorithm are
not fully admissible. Indeed, these heuristics do not
work for all domains.
Hoffman and Nebel, using and improving HSP
ideas, developed the FF (Fast-Forward) system (Hoff-
mann and Nebel, 2011), which is one of the fastest
planners in STRIPS language. The FF heuristic im-
plements a relaxed Graphplan algorithm to obtain the
minimum distance between the state and the goal
state, but this relaxed algorithm is not admissible be-
cause the relaxed Graphplan not consider the delete
list (which is all the delete effects of all operators).
The search algorithm, called Enforced Hill-Climbing
(EHC), only does a local search, which can lead to
dead ends (states from which the goals get unreach-
able).
Fourth, Bonet and Geffner used and improved
586
S. Villegas-Hernandez Y. and Guedea-Elizalde F..
Research Proposal in Probabilistic Planning Search.
DOI: 10.5220/0004907205860595
In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART-2014), pages 586-595
ISBN: 978-989-758-015-4
Copyright
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2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)