I present a language for specifying planning problems in which there are external events, that is, events beyond the direct control of the planner which may happen while a plan is being executed. The language is based on Miller and Shanahan’s representation of narratives in the situation calculus. I describe an implemented planner that produces correct plans for this language, and discuss how s...

Planning in belief space with a Labelled Uncertainty Graph, LUG, is an approach that uses a very compact planning graph to guide search in the space of belief states to construct conformant and contingent plans. A conformant plan is a plan that transitions (without sensing) all possible initial states through possibly non-deterministic actions to a goal state. A contingent plan adds the ability...

We present a decentralized cooperative exploration strategy for mobile robots. A roadmap of the explored area, with the associate safe region, is built in the form of a compact data structure, called Sensor-based Random Graph. This is incrementally expanded by the robots by using a randomized local planner which automatically realizes a trade-off between information gain and navigation cost. Co...

We present some techniques for handling planning problems with numerical expressions that can be specified using the standard planning language PDDL. These techniques are implemented in LPG, a fully-automated planner based on local search that was awarded at the third international planning competition (2002). First, we present a plan representation for handling numerical expressions called Num...

Planning a new logistics center is a quite difficult job. Depending on the requirements there are a great number of possible design versions. The planner has to consider not only the present but also the future requirements. Up to now, the planner decides on the basis of experience which system will perform the requested services best. This paper illustrates the redesign of a new order-picking ...

We study direct democracy with population uncertainty. Voters’ participation is often among the desiderata by the election designer. A participation quorum is a threshold on the fraction of participating voters below which the status quo is kept. We show that participation quorums produce incentive for partisans of the status quo to abstain, with the consequence that the status quo may be kept ...

(Appears as a regular paper in the Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI), Washington D.C, IEEE Computer Society, Nov. 2002, pp. 138-145. 27 out of 84 submissions were accepted as regular papers leading to 32 acceptance rate.) Significant advances in plan synthesis under classical assumptions have occurred in last seven years. All such efficie...

For many years, ITS researchers have strived to provide better instruction. They have various kinds of student models and expert models, as well as models of student-tutor interactions. However, little research have been conducted on instructional planning, which attempts to make a sequence of instructions optimal for a student. Obviously, the better the planner, the better instructions the ITS...