Probabilistic Knowledge of External Events in Planning

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 12

Student Abstracts

My research tries to improve the robustness of plans by using limited knowledge about external events. These are events that are not directly caused by the planning agent. I use a discrete-time model and assume that the probability of occurrence for a particular type of event in a given situation is known, but the specific occurrence of such an event cannot be predicted with certainty. For example, when a bicycle is left outside a building, there is some probability p that it will be stolen at each time point. The probability that the bicycle is still outside the building after n time units is then (1 - p)^n, neglecting the effects of other possible events.