Service-oriented computing promotes the idea of assembling application components into a network of services that can be loosely coupled to create flexible, dynamic business processes and agile ...applications that span organizations and computing platforms. An SOC research road map provides a context for exploring ongoing research activities.
Automated Planning Ghallab, Malik; Nau, Dana; Traverso, Paolo
2004, 2004-05-21
eBook, Book
Automated planning technology now plays a significant role in a variety of demanding applications, ranging from controlling space vehicles and robots to playing the game of bridge. These real-world ...applications create new opportunities for synergy between theory and practice: observing what works well in practice leads to better theories of planning, and better theories lead to better performance of practical applications. Automated Planning mirrors this dialogue by offering a comprehensive, up-to-date resource on both the theory and practice of automated planning. The book goes well beyond classical planning, to include temporal planning, resource scheduling, planning under uncertainty, and modern techniques for plan generation, such as task decomposition, propositional satisfiability, constraint satisfaction, and model checking. The authors combine over 30 years experience in planning research and development to offer an invaluable text to researchers, professionals, and graduate students. *Comprehensively explains paradigms for automated planning. *Provides a thorough understanding of theory and planning practice, and how they relate to each other. *Presents case studies of applications in space, robotics, CAD/CAM, process control, emergency operations, and games.
*Provides a thorough understanding of AI planning theory and practice, and how they relate to each other. *Covers all the contemporary topics of planning, as well as important practical applications of planning, such as model checking and game playing. *Presents case studies and applications in planning engineering, space, robotics, CAD/CAM, process control, emergency operations, and games.*Provides lecture notes, examples of programming assignments, pointers to downloadable planning systems and related information online.
The World Health Organization’s strategic plan for 2012-2020 for schistosomiasis is aimed at controlling morbidity by 2020, eliminating SH infection as a public health problem, and interrupting ...transmission in select areas by 2025.
The superior diagnostic accuracy of 68GaGa-prostate-specific membrane antigen-11 (PSMA) (68GaGa-PSMA-11) compared to 18FF-Fluorocholine Positron Emission Tomography/Computed Tomography (PET/CT) in ...Prostate Cancer (PCa) is established. However, it is currently unclear if the added diagnostic accuracy actually translates into improved clinical outcomes in oligometastatic PCa patients treated with 68GaGa-PSMA-11 PET-guided metastasis-directed therapy (MDT). The present study aimed to assess the impact of these two imaging techniques on Progression-Free Survival (PFS) in a real-world sample of oligometastatic PCa patients submitted to PET-guided MDT. Thirty-seven oligometastatic PCa patients treated with PET-guided MDT were retrospectively enrolled. MDT was guided by 18FF-Fluorocholine PET/CT in eleven patients and by 68GaGa-PSMA-11 PET/CT in twenty-six. Progression was defined as biochemical recurrence (BR), radiological progression at subsequent PET/CT imaging, clinical progression, androgen deprivation therapy initiation, or death. Clinical and imaging parameters were assessed as predictors of PFS. 18FF-Fluorocholine PET-guided MDT was associated with significantly lower PFS compared to the 68GaGa-PSMA-11 group (median PFS, mPFS 15.47 months, 95% CI: 4.13−38.00 vs. 40.93 months, 95% CI: 40.93−40.93, respectively; p < 0.05). Coherently, the radiotracer used for PET-guided MDT resulted in predictive PFS at the univariate analysis, as well as the castration-resistant status at the time of MDT and the PSA nadir after MDT. However, in the multivariate analysis, castration resistance and PSA nadir after MDT remained the sole independent predictors of PFS. In conclusion, in the present proof-of-concept study, 68GaGa-PSMA-11 provided higher PFS rates than 18FF-Fluorocholine imaging in oligometastatic PCa patients receiving PET-guided MDT. Although preliminary, this finding suggests that enlarging the “tip of the iceberg”, by detecting a major proportion of the submerged disease thanks to next-generation imaging may favourably impact the oncological outcome of oligometastatic PCa treated with MDT.
Planning is motivated by acting. Most of the existing work on automated planning underestimates the reasoning and deliberation needed for acting; it is instead biased towards path-finding methods in ...a compactly specified state-transition system. Researchers in this AI field have developed many planners, but very few actors. We believe this is one of the main causes of the relatively low deployment of automated planning applications.
In this paper, we advocate a change in focus to actors as the primary topic of investigation. Actors are not mere plan executors: they may use planning and other deliberation tools, before and during acting. This change in focus entails two interconnected principles: a hierarchical structure to integrate the actorʼs deliberation functions, and continual online planning and reasoning throughout the acting process. In the paper, we discuss open problems and research directions toward that objective in knowledge representations, model acquisition and verification, synthesis and refinement, monitoring, goal reasoning, and integration.
•Complete intracorporeal robotic ileal interposition is a feasible option for bridging full length ureteral defects.•Due to the rarity of such cases it's difficult to standardize the technique.•The ...surgical planning is of paramount importance and must be carefully targeted on the patient's characteristics.
The service-oriented paradigm promises a novel degree of interoperability between business processes, and is leading to a major shift in way distributed applications are designed and realized. While ...novel and more powerful services can be obtained, in such setting, by suitably orchestrating existing ones, manually developing such orchestrations is highly demanding, time-consuming and error-prone. Providing automated service composition tools is therefore essential to reduce the time to market of services, and ultimately to successfully enact the service-oriented approach.
In this paper, we show that such tools can be realized based on the adoption and extension of powerful AI planning techniques, taking the “planning via model-checking” approach as a stepping stone. In this respect, this paper summarizes and substantially extends a research line that started early in this decade and has continued till now. Specifically, this work provides three key contributions.
First, we describe a novel planning framework for the automated composition of Web services, which can handle services specified and implemented using industrial standard languages for business processes modeling and execution, like
ws-bpel. Since these languages describe stateful Web services that rely on asynchronous communication primitives, a distinctive aspect of the presented framework is its ability to model and solve planning problems for asynchronous domains.
Second, we formally spell out the theory underlying the framework, and provide algorithms to solve service composition in such framework, proving their correctness and completeness. The presented algorithms significantly extend state-of-the-art techniques for planning under uncertainty, by allowing the combination of asynchronous domains according to behavioral requirements.
Third, we provide and discuss an implementation of the approach, and report extensive experimental results which demonstrate its ability to scale up to significant cases for which the manual development of
ws-bpel composed services is far from trivial and time consuming.
In AI research, synthesizing a plan of action has typically used descriptive models of the actions that abstractly specify what might happen as a result of an action, and are tailored for efficiently ...computing state transitions. However, executing the planned actions has needed operational models, in which rich computational control structures and closed-loop online decision-making are used to specify how to perform an action in a nondeterministic execution context, react to events and adapt to an unfolding situation. Deliberative actors, which integrate acting and planning, have typically needed to use both of these models together—which causes problems when attempting to develop the different models, verify their consistency, and smoothly interleave acting and planning.
As an alternative, we define and implement an integrated acting and planning system in which both planning and acting use the same operational models. These rely on hierarchical task-oriented refinement methods offering rich control structures. The acting component, called Reactive Acting Engine (RAE), is inspired by the well-known PRS system. At each decision step, RAE can get advice from a planner for a near-optimal choice with respect to an utility function. The anytime planner uses a UCT-like Monte Carlo Tree Search procedure, called UPOM, whose rollouts are simulations of the actor's operational models. We also present learning strategies for use with RAE and UPOM that acquire, from online acting experiences and/or simulated planning results, a mapping from decision contexts to method instances as well as a heuristic function to guide UPOM. We demonstrate the asymptotic convergence of UPOM towards optimal methods in static domains, and show experimentally that UPOM and the learning strategies significantly improve the acting efficiency and robustness.
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