Planning at King's

OPTIC is a temporal planner for use in problems where plan cost is determined by preferences or time-dependent goal-collection costs.  Such problems arise in a range of interesting situations, from scheduling the delivery of perishable goods, to coordinating order-fulfillment activities in warehouses.

The group has had two conference papers accepted at ECAI 2012:

• Opportunistic Branched Plans to Maximise Utility in the Presence of Resource Uncertainty. A. J. Coles.
• Planning as Quantified Boolean Formula. M. Cashmore, M. Fox and E. Giunchiglia.

The group has successfully secured ESPRC funds (EP/J012157/1, fEC value £458,818) to research the use of planning to underpin policy learning for surveillance problems.  Surveillance problems give rise to many challenges including the management of uncertainty in an unpredictable environment, the management of restricted resources and the communication of commitments and requests between multiple heterogeneous agent 'observers'. At the heart of surveillance problems lies the need to plan complex sequences of behaviour that achieve surveillance goals. These goals are typically expressed in terms of gathering as much information as possible given constraints, and communicating findings to a human operator.