As more and more cities plan to deploy municipal wireless mesh networks to provide publicly-accessible infrastructure, it becomes critical to come up with a deployment plan that provides sufficient accessibility with financial and technological constraints. In this paper, we consider deploying the mesh routers that are equipped with directional antennas to form the mesh backbone. We propose GPS...

This paper describes a novel approach to planning which takes advantage of decision theory to greatly improve robustness in an uncertain environment. We present an algorithm which computes conditional plans of maximum expected utility. This algorithm relies on a representation of the search space as an AND/OR tree and employs a depth-limit to control computation costs. A numeric robustness fact...

Creation of plans and schedules for systems with random phenomena is a research area that is gaining considerable attention. Standard techniques of scheduling and exact methods cannot be utilised for stochastic systems. The measure of robustness is an important indicator of the schedule, representing the resistance of the schedule to random phenomena that occur during the execution of the sched...

A novel decomposition approach is presented for a class of on-line problems of Wagner and Whitin’s economic lot-sizing type. The decomposition is based on the fact that optimal plans contain regeneration points and that the plan between two regeneration points is independent of the rest of the plan. This property is exploited in the following way: first, estimate the next regeneration point and...

This paper describes a systematic approach for incrementally improving the security of election processes by using a model of the process to develop attack plans and then incorporating each plan into the process model to determine if it can complete successfully. More specifically, our approach first applies fault tree analysis to a detailed election process model to find process vulnerabilitie...

As no plan can cover all possible contingencies, the ability to detect failures during plan execution is crucial to the robustness of any autonomous system operating in a dynamic and uncertain environment. In this paper we present a general planning and execution monitoring system where formulas in an expressive temporal logic specify the desired behavior of a system and its environment. A unif...

Cost-Based Optimizers choose query execution plans using a cost model. The latter relies on the accuracy of estimated statistics. Unfortunately, compile-time estimates often differ significantly from runtime values, leading to a suboptimal plan choices. In this paper, we propose a compile-time strategy, wherein the optimization process is fully aware of the estimation inaccuracy. This is ensure...

Background: Systematic conservation planning involves the prioritisation of conservation actions to optimise biodiversity conservation outcomes whilst considering implementation challenges such as minimising costs. Thousands of systematic conservation plans have been developed around the globe (a popular software package, ‘Marxan’, has over 4200 active users from more than 180 countries). Howev...