Variable-Delay Controllability

In temporal planning, agents must schedule a set of events satisfying a set of predetermined constraints. These scheduling problems become more difficult when the duration of certain actions are outside the agent's control. Delay controllability is the generalized notion of whether a schedule c...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bhargava, Nikhil (Author), Muise, Christian (Author), Williams, Brian (Author)
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, 2020-06-08T14:56:21Z.
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Description
Summary:In temporal planning, agents must schedule a set of events satisfying a set of predetermined constraints. These scheduling problems become more difficult when the duration of certain actions are outside the agent's control. Delay controllability is the generalized notion of whether a schedule can be constructed in the face of uncertainty if the agent eventually learns when events occur. Our work introduces the substantially more complex setting of determining variable-delay controllability, where an agent learns about events after some unknown but bounded amount of time has passed. We provide an efficient O(n3) variable-delay controllability checker and show how to create an execution strategy for variable-delay controllability problems. To our knowledge, these essential capabilities are absent from existing controllability checking algorithms. We conclude by providing empirical evaluations of the quality of variable-delay controllability results as compared to approximations that use fixed delays to model the same problems.
Toyota Research Institute (Grant LP-C000765-SR)