Plan Development using Local Probabilistic Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a local probabilistic modeling approach for plan development in dynamic environments, integrating temporally-dependent transition probabilities to improve real-time planning in complex systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel method for incorporating temporally-dependent probabilistic models into local state transition computations within a real-time planning architecture.

Findings

Improved planning performance in flight simulation tests.

Effective elimination of improbable states during plan development.

Enhanced real-time guarantees in the CIRCA system.

Abstract

Approximate models of world state transitions are necessary when building plans for complex systems operating in dynamic environments. External event probabilities can depend on state feature values as well as time spent in that particular state. We assign temporally -dependent probability functions to state transitions. These functions are used to locally compute state probabilities, which are then used to select highly probable goal paths and eliminate improbable states. This probabilistic model has been implemented in the Cooperative Intelligent Real-time Control Architecture (CIRCA), which combines an AI planner with a separate real-time system such that plans are developed, scheduled, and executed with real-time guarantees. We present flight simulation tests that demonstrate how our probabilistic model may improve CIRCA performance.