bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Educational technology for infants’ families to identify warning signs: a validation study
Authors: Rodrigues Icleia Parente , Pinheiro Patrícia Neyva da Costa , Mondragón-Sánchez Edna Johana , Costa Maria Isabelly Fernandes da , Paula Paulo Henrique Alexandre de , Sales Joana Maria Rocha , Brito Larissa Ludmila Monteiro de Souza , Queiroz Maria Veraci Oliveira
Published: September 2022

ABSTRACT Objective: To validate, with the target audience, the usability and appearance of a serialized album about the warning signs to the health of children below 2 months. Method: Methodological validation study with the target population of an educational material in the form of a serialized album. 11 mothers with children under 2 months of age participated. The domains evaluated were: Objectives, Organization, Writing Style, Appearance, and Motivation. Data were analyzed using descriptive and statistics, and the data agreement index was calculated. Results: The global data agreement index was high (0.99). Mothers had positive responses, recognizing the excellence of the material: attractive figures that were easy to understand. Conclusion: The validation of the serialized album provides mothers with the abilities and knowledge they need to identify warning signs in regard to the health of their children, providing them with autonomy, corresponsibility, and helping them develop better child health practices.
Formation of a new rural power structure and the failure of gender in utopia: lesbian image and its metaphors in Wildcat Lake
Authors: Zhe Dai , Juan Wen
Published: September 2022

Abstract: Chen Yingsong created Wildcat Lake not just for telling a story about lesbians but also by describing how Xiang’er, a rural woman, becomes a lesbian in the villages. We can see the “richness” and “metaphorical meaning” of the lesbian symbol. As far as Wildcat Lake is concerned, it is more worthy of discussing how Xiang’er becomes a lesbian, which is not only about sex or gender, but also about political and economic oppression. Therefore, the so-called gender in Utopia will inevitably fail. Furthermore, the loss of rural subjectivity during modernization and transformation, the subsequent new power structure, and the resulting oppression and exploitation are the fundamental reasons for Xiang’er to become a lesbian and eventually “kill her husband”.
INCLUSION OF STUDENTS WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES: RESOURCES AND DIFFICULTIES OF FAMILY AND TEACHERS
Authors: SILVA ELIZA FRANÇA E , ELIAS LUCIANA CARLA DOS SANTOS
Published: September 2022

ABSTRACT: Educational inclusion is based on the principle that all students should learn together, in regular schools, regardless of their differences. The family-school partnership is an important factor associated with the success of inclusion. This study aimed to verify how the inclusion process of students with intellectual disabilities occurs, by identifying resources and difficulties, according to information provided by parents and teachers. This is a qualitative and cross-sectional study. Semi-structured interviews were done with 42 parents and 34 teachers of 44 students diagnosed with intellectual disabilities enrolled in regular public schools in a city in the interior of Minas Gerais. The data were analyzed in the Iramuteq software. Five classes were obtained by the parents’ interview: Family context, resources and parents' difficulties; Relationships with the school; Participation in schooling; Children's difficulty; and Path of diagnosis and follow-ups. Likewise, five classes in the analysis of the teachers' information: Understanding the inclusion process; School-family relationship; Difficulties in the inclusion process; Teachers' practices within the classroom; and Student development. The classes comprise themes related to the perception of participants. Parents pointed out difficulties in providing support to their children in the face of school adversities and as resource support in their relationship with the school. The teachers pointed out daily difficulties in the inclusion process and problems in the family-school partnership. It was possible to provide indicators of aspects of the inclusion process to provide subsidiary functions in this context.
A Variabilidade Intrassazonal e Interanual do Acoplamento entre a Zona de Convergência do Atlântico Sul e o Vórtice Ciclônico de Altos Níveis
Authors: Braga Hugo A. , Ambrizzi Tercio
Published: September 2022

Resumo A relação entre a Zona de Convergência do Atlântico Sul (ZCAS) e o Vórtice Ciclônico de Altos Níveis (VCAN) foi analisada durante 34 verões austrais, de acordo com as fases positivas, negativas e neutras do El Niño Oscilação Sul (ENOS). Anomalias das componentes zonais e meridionais do vento, foram calculadas com base na climatologia de 1979-2013 no nível de 200 hPa, e submetidos ao filtro de Lanczos nas bandas temporais de 20-90 dias e 200 dias passa baixa, com a intenção de destacar as variabilidades intrassazonal e interanual, através da análise observacional de três composições médias de ZCAS referentes às fases positiva, negativa e neutra do ENOS. As composições filtradas nas bandas intrassazonal e interanual revelam a intensificação do VCAN tanto para os casos de ZCAS-El Niño e de ZCAS-Neutras, enquanto que a variabilidade interanual durante eventos de ZCAS sob anos de La Niña inibem a ação do VCAN próximo do continente a partir de uma circulação anticiclônica na região.
Beliefs Toward Cure of Homosexuality Scale: Evidence for Factor Structure
Authors: Rezende Alessandro Teixeira , Gouveia Valdiney Veloso , Loureto Gleidson Diego Lopes , Ribeiro Maria Gabriela Costa , Oliveira Karen Guedes de
Published: September 2022

Abstract This study aimed to confirm the multifactorial structure of the Beliefs Toward Cure of Homosexuality Scale (BTCHS) - (ECCH in Portuguese) and to verify evidence of its validity based on external variables. To this end, two studies were carried out. In Study 1, there were 214 university students, with an average age of 24 years (SD = 9.15). These students answered the HCBS and demographic questions. The results indicated a satisfactory fit for multifactorial modeling. Study 2, in turn, presented 430 university students with an average age of 23 years (SD = 7.90). In addition to the HCBS, the participants responded to the measures of sexual prejudice (MSP) and attitudes towards gays and lesbians (ATGL) questionnaires. Performing correlation analyses between the variables, we found significant correlations between the HCBS and the MSP and ATGL. In conclusion, the HCBS presented an adequate data-model fit for its multifactorial structure and evidence for its validity based on external variables.
Conception of workers in a municipal health network about the service-management relationship
Authors: Belotti Meyrielle , Andreatta Paloma Pereira , Constatinidis Teresinha Cid , Dias Andrea Thamiris Barbosa , Reis Luciana Bicalho , Iglesias Alexandra
Published: September 2022

Abstract The objective of this work was to understand the conceptions of health professionals about the relationship between management and the different services that constitute the public health network of a municipality in the southeastern region of Brazil. It used the Focus Group (FG) technique for data collection. Three FG were held with an average of 12 participants per meeting, totaling 38 participants. The Lexical Descending Hierarchical Classification analysis was applied with the support of the Iramuteq software. The results outlined four classes: Management-Service Relationship; Daily challenges of services; Sustainability of work in the territory and Prioritization of the user. The relationship between health services and management was marked by hierarchical practices. However, it was possible to verify that there are expectations regarding the establishment of a transversal relationship. Collective spaces and user participation in care management are considered as important elements for co-management.
Influence of the cooling process on the physicochemical properties of ladle furnace slag, used in the replacement of Portland cement
Authors: Silva Tayná Fracão da , Moura Marinara Andrade do Nascimento , Souza Everton de Freitas Cordova de , Ferreira Gisleiva Cristina dos Santos , Pereira Vanessa Ferreira Roche
Published: September 2022

ABSTRACT Ladle furnace slag is a waste composed essentially of quicklime or hydrated lime, whose contents depend on the raw material and the cooling process that led to the slag batch. With this chemical composition, it is used by civil construction as a hydraulic binder in cement matrices. The chemical compounds mentioned are also present in Portland cement, which are part of the chemical reactions of hydration and hardening. However, the quality of LFS batches calls for attention to volume expansion caused by chemical compounds whose presence and content can be controlled by the cooling method adopted in the production. Considering the use of this material as a partial replacement for Portland cement, the objective of this study was the physicochemical characterization of LFS samples to evaluate the influence of the cooling method on its potential as a complementary binder in cementitious matrices. In this sense, 3 samples from different batches were analyzed and the effects of each cooling process. The results include analysis of specific mass, laser diffraction for particle size analysis, X-ray fluorescence and X-Ray Diffraction tests. It was verified that the sample obtained by slow cooling is the most suitable as binder, as it features less possibility of expansive chemical reactions and presents greater fineness.
Assessment of phytoremediation potential of native plant species naturally growing in a heavy metal-polluted industrial soils
Authors: Naz R. , Khan M. S. , Hafeez A. , Fazil M. , Khan M. N. , Ali B. , Javed M. A. , Imran M. , Shati A. A. , Alfaifi M. Y. , Elbehairi S. E. I. , Ahmed A. E.
Published: September 2022

Abstract The present study was carried out in Hayat Abad Industrial Estate located in Peshawar to assess the levels of cadmium (Cd) that were present in the soil as well as the plant parts (Roots and shoots). To evaluate the phytoremediation potential of the plants different factors i.e. Bioconcentration Factor (BCF), Translocation Factor (TF), and Bioaccumulation Coefficient were determined. These plants were grown in their native habitats (BAC). We have analysed, cadmium concentration from soil which are collected from 50 different locations ranged from 11.54 mg/Kg (the lowest) to 89.80 mg/Kg (highest). The maximum concentration (89.80 mg/Kg) of cadmium was found in HIE-ST-16L Marble City and HIE-ST-7 Bryon Pharma (88.51 mg/Kg) while its minimum concentration (12.47 mg/Kg) were detected in the soil of Site (HIE-ST-14L Royal PVC Pipe) and (11.54 mg/Kg) at the site (HIE-ST-11 Aries Pharma). Most plant species showed huge potential for plant based approaches like phyto-extraction and phytoremediation. They also showed the potential for phyto-stabilization as well. Based on the concentration of cadmium the most efficient plants for phytoextraction were Cnicus benedictus, Parthenium hysterophorus, Verbesina encelioides, Conyza canadensis, Xanthium strumarium, Chenopodium album, Amaranthus viridis, Chenopodiastrum murale, Prosopis juliflora, Convolvulus arvensis, Stellaria media, Arenaria serpyllifolia, Cerastium dichotomum, Chrozophora tinctoria, Mirabilis jalapa, Medicago polymorpha, Lathyrus aphaca, Dalbergia sissoo, Melilotus indicus and Anagallis arvensis. The cadmium heavy metals in the examined soil were effectively removed by these plant species. Cerastium dichotomum, and Chenopodium murale were reported to be effective in phyto-stabilizing Cd based on concentrations of selected metals in roots and BCFs, TFs, and BACs values.
Entre a ciência e a política: Donald Pierson e a busca por uma sociologia científica no Brasil
Authors: Maio Marcos Chor , Lopes Thiago da Costa
Published: September 2022

Resumo Este artigo analisa a dimensão política contida na obra do sociólogo americano Donald Pierson no Brasil. Ex-aluno de Robert Park na Universidade de Chicago, Pierson desempenhou um papel importante na institucionalização das ciências sociais no Brasil entre os anos 1930 e 1950. Embora as ambições intelectuais de Pierson estivessem centradas em uma agenda acadêmica e ele defendesse uma estrita separação entre ciência e política, argumentamos que uma compreensão histórica precisa de seus esforços só pode ser alcançada por meio da análise dos pressupostos subjacentes à sua visão sobre a natureza da ciência e da sociedade – pressupostos esses que tinham raízes em uma perspectiva reformista e liberal-democrática do mundo. Para trazer à luz esses valores, examinamos dois momentos-chave na carreira de Pierson: 1) sua pesquisa de doutorado sobre relações raciais na Bahia, realizada em meados da década de 1930; 2) seus esforços para promover o campo da sociologia no Brasil durante a Política da Boa Vizinhança e a Segunda Guerra Mundial, quando foi contratado para lecionar na Escola Livre de Sociologia e Política.
Desde la distancia: elementos para una sociología del contacto en un contexto de pandemia
Authors: Zapata Daniel Castaño , Romero Gabriel Ruiz
Published: September 2022

Resumen Exploramos en este texto la reconfiguración de relaciones sociales bajo la imposición del distanciamiento físico en el contexto de la pandemia del Covid-19. Específicamente, analizamos la pérdida de la dimensión háptica de las relaciones socioeróticas y la transformación sociocultural que esto conlleva. Basados en un trabajo de campo desde la distancia, exploramos cómo el cuerpo propio y el de aquellos con quienes tenemos vínculos sociales afectivos se ha vuelto siniestro, esto es, al tiempo familiar y extraño. Sostenemos, finalmente, que la suspensión momentánea del fondo común histórico y cultural de las relaciones socioafectivas permitió identificar las condiciones de posibilidad de las mismas, revelándolas no sólo como intersubjetivas sino definidas por otros agentes que determinan la ecología de dichas relaciones.
POLÍTICAS PÚBLICAS PARA A EDUCAÇÃO SUPERIOR: O CASO DO CARIRI CEARENSE
Authors: Silva Wagner Pires da
Published: September 2022

RESUMO O presente artigo apresenta a política pública de expansão do Ensino Superior no Cariri Cearense. Para tanto, o trabalho apresenta o histórico do Ensino Superior e da sua expansão e discute as especificidades dessa para o território semiárido. Utilizando uma abordagem qualitativa ancorada em dados quantitativos o estudo aborda as duas principais instituições de Ensino Superior surgidas com a expansão, uma pública e uma privada, e infere, a partir do comparativo entre ambas, as diferenças da expansão por meio de instituições públicas e a expansão das instituições privadas de ensino.
Physiotherapy in obstetrics through the eyes of pregnant women: a qualitative study
Authors: Keil Marina Joice , Delgado Alexandre Magno , Xavier Mikaela Aparecida de Oliveira , Nascimento Cassiane Merigo do
Published: September 2022

Abstract Introduction: Physiotherapy in women's health emerged with the aim of promoting and maintaining physical and emotional health from the beginning to the end of pregnancy, through preventive measures against possible injuries that may occur during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum. Access to knowledge about obstetric physiotherapy among pregnant women is increasing, which may contribute to a search for trained professionals. Objective: To analyze the perception of pregnant women about obstetric physiotherapy. Methods: This is a qualitative study carried out at the Materno Infantil Center, in Capanema, Parana state (PR), using a semistructured interview. Content analysis used the Bardin method to categorize the thematic axes. Results: Seven pregnant women aged between 18-24 years (57%), 23-32 weeks of gestation (42%), multiparous (71%), with secondary education (42%) and income between 1-3 monthly minimum wages (86 %) were included in the study. It was found that participants’ perception of physiotherapy was inaccurate, because none of the women had accessed this treatment. The women stated that physiotherapists reduce labor pain, but they have no knowledge of how these professionals work in the postpartum. Conclusion: It is concluded that it is necessary to increase information on the contribution of physiotherapists during prenatal care, delivery and postpartum.
Pedagogía del don comunitario
Authors: Montes Ulises Ventura
Published: September 2022

El propósito de esta investigación consiste en presentar una pedagogía sustentada en la antropología filosófica del don. Entendiendo al don como una acción recíproca y benéfica para conservar la armonía social. Es decir, un espacio donde prima el valor de la palabra, que es el honor de cada individuo, y que además está sustentado en el mutuo respeto de las acciones de ambas partes: alguien tiene que iniciar el don (un hecho tangible o intangible) para recién después ser el receptor; así como una persona está obligada también a devolver lo que le fue entregado. Esta pedagogía no es más que el honor de la palabra hecha en sí misma una acción consecuente; de ahí su componente comunitario. El soporte teórico del don en mención es más de un arraigo cultural que biológico; por ello, se presenta un marco referencial de la cultura. Se concluye que el don comunitario tiene una dimensión ética; por lo que la construcción de los buenos hábitos es producto de la reciprocidad moralista y espiritual más que una coacción legal propiamente establecida.
Optimality Properties of Planning Via Petri Net Unfolding: A Formal Analysis
Authors: Hickmott Sarah , Sardina Sebastian
Published: September 2022

We provide a theoretical analysis of planning via Petri net unfolding, a novel technique for synthesising parallel plans. Parallel plans are generally valued for their execution ﬂexi- bility, which manifests as alternative choices for the order- ing of operators and potentially faster plan executions. Being a relatively new approach, the ﬂexibility properties of plans synthesised via unfolding, and even the concurrency seman- tics supported by this technique, are particularly unclear and only understood at an informal level. In this paper, we ﬁrst formally characterise the concurrency semantics of planning via unfolding as a further restriction on the standard notion of independence. More importantly, we then prove that plans obtained using this approach are optimal deorderings and op- timal reorderings in terms of the number of ordering con- straints on operators and plan execution time, respectively. These results provide objective guarantees on the quality of plans obtained by the unfolding technique.
Information-Theoretic Approach to Efficient Adaptive Path Planning for Mobile Robotic Environmental Sensing
Authors: Low Kian Hsiang , Dolan John , Khosla Pradeep
Published: September 2022

Recent research in robot exploration and mapping has focused on sampling environmental hotspot fields. This exploration task is formalized by Low, Dolan, and Khosla (2008) in a sequential decision-theoretic planning under uncertainty framework called MASP. The time complexity of solving MASP approximately depends on the map resolution, which limits its use in large-scale, high-resolution exploration and mapping. To alleviate this computational difficulty, this paper presents an information-theoretic approach to MASP (iMASP) for efficient adaptive path planning; by reformulating the cost-minimizing iMASP as a reward-maximizing problem, its time complexity becomes independent of map resolution and is less sensitive to increasing robot team size as demonstrated both theoretically and empirically. Using the reward-maximizing dual, we derive a novel adaptive variant of maximum entropy sampling, thus improving the induced exploration policy performance. It also allows us to establish theoretical bounds quantifying the performance advantage of optimal adaptive over non-adaptive policies and the performance quality of approximately optimal vs. optimal adaptive policies. We show analytically and empirically the superior performance of iMASP-based policies for sampling the log-Gaussian process to that of policies for the widely-used Gaussian process in mapping the hotspot field. Lastly, we provide sufficient conditions that, when met, guarantee adaptivity has no benefit under an assumed environment model.
Flexible Execution of Plans with Choice
Authors: Conrad Patrick , Shah Julie , Williams Brian
Published: September 2022

Dynamic plan execution strategies allow an autonomous agent to respond to uncertainties while improving robustness and reducing the need for an overly conservative plan. Executives have improved this robustness by expanding the types of choices made dynamically, such as selecting alternate methods. However, in methods to date, these additional choices introduce substantial run-time latency. This paper presents a novel system called Drake that makes steps towards executing an expanded set of choices dynamically without significant latency. Drake frames a plan as a Disjunctive Temporal Problem and executes it with a fast dynamic scheduling algorithm. Prior work demonstrated an efficient technique for dynamic execution of one special type of DTPs by using an off-line compilation step to find the possible consistent choices and compactly record the differences between them. Drake extends this work to handle a more general set of choices by recording the minimal differences between the solutions which are required at run-time. On randomly generated structured plans with choice, we show a reduction in the size of the solution set of over two orders of magnitude, compared to prior art.
Inference and Decomposition in Planning Using Causal Consistent Chains
Authors: Lipovetzky Nir , Geffner Hector
Published: September 2022

Current state-of-the-art planners solve problems, easy and hard alike, by search, expanding hundreds or thousands of nodes. Yet, given the ability of people to solve easy problems and to explain their solutions, it seems that an essential inferential component may be missing. The reasons expressed by people for selecting  actions appear to be related to causal chains: sequences of causal links ai → pi + 1, i = 0, ..., n – 1, such that a0 is applicable in the current state, pi is a precondition of action ai, and pn is a goal. Some of these causal chains or paths appear to be good, some bad, others appear to be impossible. In this work, we focus on such paths and develop three techniques for performing inference over them  from which a  path-based planner is obtained. We define the conditions under which a path is consistent, provide an heuristic estimate of the cost of achieving the goal along a consistent path, and introduce a planning algorithm that uses paths as decomposition backbones. The resulting planner, called C3, is not complete and does not perform as well as recent planners that carry extensive but extremely efficient searches such as LAMA, but is competitive with FF and in particular, with FF running in EHC mode which yields very focused but incomplete searches, and thus provides, a more apt comparison. Moreover, many domains are solved backtrack-free, with no search at all, suggesting that planning with paths may be a meaningful idea both cognitively and computationally.
A Semantics for HTN Methods
Authors: Goldman Robert
Published: September 2022

Despite the extensive development of first-principles planning in recent years, planning applications are still primarily developed using knowledge-based planners which can exploit domain-specific heuristics and weaker domain models.  Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planners capture domain-specific heuristics for more efficient search, accommodate incomplete causal models, and can be used to enforce standard operating procedures.  Unfortunately, we do not have semantics for the methods or tasks that make up HTN models, that help evaluate the correctness of methods, or to build a reliable executive for HTN plans.  This paper fills the gap by providing a well-defined semantics for the methods and plans of SHOP2, a state-of-the-art HTN planner.  The semantics are defined in terms of concurrent golog (ConGolog) and the situation calculus.  We provide a proof of equivalence between the plans generated by SHOP2 and the action sequences of the ConGolog semantics.  We show how the semantics reflects the distinction between plan-time and execution-time, and provide some simple examples showing how the semantics can support method verification.  The semantics provide an implementation-neutral specification for an executive, showing how an executive must treat the plans SHOP2 generates in order to enforce the expected behaviors.  Future directions include automated verification of method specifications, automatically generating plan monitors, and plan revision and repair.
Extended Goals for Composing Services
Authors: Kaldeli Eirini , Lazovik Alexander , Aiello Marco
Published: September 2022

The ability to automatically compose Web Services is critical for realising  more complex functionalities.  Several proposals to use automated planning to deal with the problem of service composition have been recently made. We present an approach, based on modelling the problem as a CSP (Constraint  Satisfaction Problem), that accommodates for the use of numeric variables, sensing and incomplete knowledge. We introduce a language for expressing extended goals, equipped with temporal constructs, maintainability properties, and an explicit distinction between sensing and achievement goals, in order to avoid undesirable situations.
Using Distance Estimates in Heuristic Search
Authors: Thayer Jordan , Ruml Wheeler
Published: September 2022

This paper explores the use of an oft-ignored information source in heuristic search: a search-distance-to-go estimate. Operators frequently have different costs and cost-to-go is not the same as search-distance-to-go.  We evaluate two previous proposals: dynamically weighted A* and A* epsilon.  We present a revision to dynamically weighted A* that improves its performance substantially in domains where the search does not progress uniformly towards solutions, and particularly in certain temporal planning problems.  We show how to incorporate distance estimates into weighted A* and improve its performance in several domains. Both approaches lead to dramatic performance increases in popular benchmark domains.
Ant Search Strategies For Planning Optimization
Authors: Baioletti Marco , Milani Alfredo , Poggioni Valentina , Rossi Fabio
Published: September 2022

In this paper a planning framework based on Ant Colony Optimization techniques is presented. It is well known that finding optimal solutions to planning problems is a very hard computational problem. Stochastic methods do not guarantee either optimality or completeness, but it has been proved that in many applications they are able to find very good, often optimal, solutions. We propose several approaches based both on backward and forward search over the state space, using several heuristics and testing different pheromone models in order to solve sequential optimization planning problems.
Using Backwards Generated Goals for Heuristic Planning
Authors: Alcázar Vidal , Borrajo Daniel , Linares López Carlos
Published: September 2022

Forward State Planning with Reachability Heuristics is arguably the most successful approach to Automated Planning up to date. In addition to an estimation of the distance to the goal, relaxed plans obtained with such heuristics provide the search with useful information such as helpful actions and look-ahead states. However, this information is extracted only from the beginning of the relaxed plan. In this paper, we propose using information extracted from the last actions in the relaxed plan to generate intermediate goals backwards. This allows us to use information from previous computations of the heuristic and reduce the depth of the search tree.
Pattern Database Heuristics for Fully Observable Nondeterministic Planning
Authors: Mattmüller Robert , Ortlieb Manuela , Helmert Malte , Bercher Pascal
Published: September 2022

When planning in an uncertain environment, one is often interested in finding a contingent plan that prescribes appropriate actions for all possible states that may be encountered during the execution of the plan. We consider the problem of finding strong cyclic plans for fully observable nondeterministic (FOND) planning problems. The algorithm we choose is LAO*, an informed explicit state search algorithm. We investigate the use of pattern database (PDB) heuristics to guide LAO* towards goal states. To obtain a fully domain-independent planning system, we use an automatic pattern selection procedure that performs local search in the space of pattern collections. The evaluation of our system on the FOND benchmarks of the Uncertainty Part of the International Planning Competition 2008 shows that our approach is competitive with symbolic regression search in terms of problem coverage, speed, and plan quality.
Self-Taught Decision Theoretic Planning with First Order Decision Diagrams
Authors: Joshi Saket , Kersting Kristian , Khardon Roni
Published: September 2022

We present a new paradigm for planning by learning, where the planner is given a model of the world and a small set of states of interest, but no indication of optimal actions in these states. The additional information can help focus the planner on regions of the state space that are of interest and lead to improved performance. We demonstrate this idea by introducing novel model-checking reduction operations for First Order Decision Diagrams (FODD), a representation that has been used to implement decision-theoretic planning with Relational Markov Decision Processes (RMDP). Intuitively, these reductions modify the construction of the value function by removing any complex specifications that are irrelevant to the set of training examples, thereby focusing on the region of interest. We show that such training examples can be constructed on the fly from a description of the planning problem thus we can bootstrap to get a self-taught planning system. Additionally, we provide a new heuristic to embed universal and conjunctive goals within the framework of RMDP planners, expanding the scope and applicability of such systems. We show that these ideas lead to significant improvements in performance in terms of both speed and coverage of the planner, yielding state of the art planning performance on problems from the International Planning Competition.
Perfect Hashing for State Space Exploration on the GPU
Authors: Edelkamp Stefan , Sulewski Damian , Yücel Cengizhan
Published: September 2022

This paper exploits parallel computing power of graphics cards to accelerate state space search. We illustrate that modern graphics processing units (GPUs) have the potential to speed up breadth-first search significantly. For a bitvector representation of the search frontier, GPU algorithms with one and two bits per state are presented. Efficient perfect hash functions and their inverse are explored in order to achieve enhanced compression. We report maximal speed-ups of up to a factor of 27 wrt. single core CPU computation.
Cost-Optimal Factored Planning: Promises and Pitfalls
Authors: Fabre Eric , Jezequel Loig , Haslum Patrik , Thiébaux Sylvie
Published: September 2022

Factored planning methods aim to exploit locality to efficiently solve large but "loosely coupled" planning problems by computing solutions locally and propagating limited information between components. However, all factored planning methods presented so far work with representations that require certain parameters to be bounded (e.g. number of coordination points between local plans considered); the satisfaction of those bounds by a given problem instance is difficult to establish a priori, and the influence of those parameters on the problem complexity is unclear. We present an instance of the factored planning framework using a representation of the (regular) sets of local plans by finite automata, which does not require any such bound. By substituting weighted automata, we can even do factored cost-optimal planning. We test an implementation of the method on the few standard planning benchmarks that we have found to be amenable to factoring. We show that this method runs in polynomial time under conditions similar to those considered in previous work, but not only under those conditions. Thus, what constitutes an essential measure of "factorability" remains obscure.
A Comparison of Algorithms for Solving the Multiagent Simple Temporal Problem
Authors: Boerkoel Jr. James , Durfee Edmund
Published: September 2022

The Simple Temporal Problem (STP) is a popular representation for solving centralized scheduling and planning problems. When scheduling agents are associated with different users who need to coordinate some of their activities, however, considerations such as privacy and scalability suggest solving the joint STP in a more distributed manner. Building on recent advances in STP algorithms that exploit loosely-coupled problem structure, this paper develops and evaluates algorithms for solving the multiagent STP. We define a partitioning of the multiagent STP with provable privacy guarantees, and show that our algorithms can exploit this partitioning while still finding the tightest consistent bounds on timepoints that must be coordinated across agents. We also demonstrate empirically that our algorithms can exploit concurrent computation, leading to solution time speed-ups over state-of-the-art centralized approaches, and enabling scalability to problems involving larger numbers of loosely-coupled agents.
Coming Up With Good Excuses: What to do When no Plan Can be Found
Authors: Göbelbecker Moritz , Keller Thomas , Eyerich Patrick , Brenner Michael , Nebel Bernhard
Published: September 2022

When using a planner-based agent architecture, many things can go wrong. First and foremost, an agent might fail to execute one of the planned actions for some reasons. Even more annoying, however, is a situation where the agent is incompetent, i.e., unable to come up with a plan. This might be due to the fact that there are principal reasons that prohibit a successful plan or simply because the task's description is incomplete or incorrect. In either case, an explanation for such a failure would be very helpful. We will address this problem and provide a formalization of coming up with excuses for not being able to find a plan. Based on that, we will present an algorithm that is able to find excuses and demonstrate that such excuses can be found in practical settings in reasonable time.
From Automated Veriﬁcation to Automated Design
Authors: Vardi Moshe
Published: September 2022

In this talk I will review 50 years of research on the design-synthesis problem and show how the automata-theoretic approach can be used to solve it.
Temporal Planning with Problems Requiring Concurrency through Action Graphs and Local Search
Authors: Gerevini Alfonso , Saetti Alessandro , Serina Ivan
Published: September 2022

We present an extension of the planning framework based on action graphs and local search to deal with PDDL2.1 temporal problems requiring concurrency, while previously the approach could only solve problems admitting a sequential solution. The paper introduces a revised plan representation supporting concurrency and some new search techniques using it, which are implemented in a new version of the LPG planner. An experimental analysis indicates that the proposed approach is suitable to temporal planning with requiring concurrency and is competitive with state-of-the-art planners.
Preface
Authors: Bacchus Fahiem , Domshlak Carmel , Edelkamp Stefan , Helmert Malte
Published: September 2022

This volume contains the papers accepted for presentation at ICAPS 2011, the Twenty-First International Conferenceon Automated Planning and Scheduling, held in Freiburg, Germany, on June 11–16, 2011. The annual ICAPS conference series was established in 2003 through the merger of two pre-existing biennial conferences, the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS) and the European Conference on Planning (ECP). ICAPS continues the traditional high standards of AIPS and ECP as an archival forum for new research in the rapidly developing field of automated planning andscheduling. This volume contains the papers accepted at the conference.
Limits for Compact Representation of Plans
Authors: Backstrom Christer , Jonsson Peter
Published: September 2022

Most planning formalisms allow instances with shortest plans of exponential length. While such instances are problematic, they are usually unavoidable and can occur in practice. There are several known cases of restricted planning problems where plans can be exponential but always have a compact (ie. polynomial) representation, often using recursive macros. Such compact representations are important since exponential plans are difficult both to use and to understand. We show that these results do not extend to the general case, by proving a number of bounds for compact representations of plans under various criteria, like efficient sequential or random access of actions. Further, we show that it is unlikely to get around this by reformulating planning into some other problem. The results are discussed in the context of abstraction, macros and plan explanation.
Cross-Domain Action-Model Acquisition for Planning via Web Search
Authors: Zhuo Hankz Hankui , Yang Qiang , Pan Rong , Li Lei
Published: September 2022

Applying learning techniques to acquire action models is an area of intense research interest. Most previous works in this area have assumed that there is a significant amount of training data available in a planning domain of interest, which we call target domain, where action models are to be learned. However, it is often difficult to acquire sufficient training data to ensure that the learned action models are of high quality. In this paper, we develop a novel approach to learning action models with limited training data in the target domain by transferring knowledge from related auxiliary or source domains. We assume that the action models in the source domains have already been created before, and seek to transfer as much of the the available information from the source domains as possible to help our learning task. We first exploit a Web searching method to bridge the target and source domains, such that transferrable knowledge from source domains is identified. We then encode the transferred knowledge together with the available data from the target domain as constraints in a maximum satisfiability problem, and solve these constraints using a weighted MAX-SAT solver. We finally transform the solutions thus obtained into high-quality target-domain action models. We empirically show that our transfer-learning based framework is effective in several domains, including the International Planning Competition (IPC) domains and some synthetic domains.
A Path Planning Algorithm for an AUV Guided with Homotopy Classes
Authors: Hernandez Emili , Carreras Marc , Ridao Pere
Published: September 2022

The paper proposes a method that uses topological information to guide path planning in any 2D workspace. Our method builds a topological environment based on the workspace to compute homotopy classes, which topologically describe how paths go through the obstacles in the workspace. Then, the homotopy classes are sorted according to an heuristic estimation of their lower bound. Only those with smaller lower bound are used to guide a planner based on the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT), called Homotopic RRT (HRRT), to compute the path in the workspace. Simulated and real results with an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) are presented showing the feasibility of the proposal. Comparison with well-known path planning algorithms has also been included.
Automatic Polytime Reductions of NP Problems into a Fragment of STRIPS
Authors: Porco Aldo , Machado Alejandro , Bonet Blai
Published: September 2022

We present a software tool that is able to automatically translate an NP problem into a STRIPS problem such that the former problem has a solution iff the latter has one, a solution for the latter can be transformed into a solution for the former, and all this can be done efficiently. Moreover, the tool is built such that it only produces problems that belong to a fragment of STRIPS that is solvable in non-deterministic polynomial time, a fact that guarantees that the whole approach is not an overkill. This tool has interesting applications. For example, with the advancement of planning technology, it can be used as an off-the-shelf method to solve general NP problems with the help of planners and to automatically generate benchmark problems of known complexity in a systematic and controlled manner. Another interesting contribution is related to the area of Knowledge Engineering in which one of the goals is to devise automatic methods for using the available planning technology to solve real-life problems.
Trade-Offs in Sampling-Based Adversarial Planning
Authors: Ramanujan Raghuram , Selman Bart
Published: September 2022

The Upper Confidence bounds for Trees (UCT) algorithm has in recent years captured the attention of the planning and game-playing community due to its notable success in the game of Go. However, attempts to reproduce similar levels of performance in domains that are the forte of Minimax-style algorithms have been largely unsuccessful, making any comparative studies of the two hard. In this paper, we study UCT in the game of Mancala, which to our knowledge is the first domain where both search algorithms perform quite well with minimal enhancement. We focus on the three key components of the UCT algorithm in its purest form - targeted node expansion, state value estimation via playouts and averaging backups - and look at their contributions to the overall performance of the algorithm. We study the trade-offs involved in using alternate ways to perform these steps. Finally, we demonstrate a novel hybrid approach to enhancing UCT, that exploits its superior decision accuracy in regions of the search space with few terminal nodes.
Partial-Order Support-Link Scheduling
Authors: Banerjee Debdeep , Haslum Patrik
Published: September 2022

Partial-order schedules are valued because they are flexible, and therefore more robust to unexpected delays. Previous work has indicated that constructing partial-order schedules by a two-stage method, in which a fixed-time schedule is first found and a partial order then lifted from it, is far more efficient than constructing them directly by a least-commitment partial-order scheduling algorithm. However, the two-stage method is limited to exploring only a fraction of the space of partial-order schedules, namely those that can be obtained from the given fixed-time schedule. We introduce a novel constraint formulation of partial-order scheduling, which establishes explicit resource-providing "links" between activities instead of detecting and eliminating potential resource conflicts. We show that this yields an algorithm that is much faster than previous (precedence constraint posting) partial-order scheduling methods, and comparable to the two-stage method in terms of the quality and robustness of the schedules it finds. This algorithm is also complete, and because it searches the entire space of partial-order schedules, can be adapted to optimising different robustness criteria.
Preface
Authors: McCluskey Thomas , Williams Brian , Silva José , Bonet Blai
Published: September 2022

This volume contains the papers accepted for presentation at ICAPS 2012, the Twenty-Second International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, to be held in Atibaia, São Paulo, Brazil, June 25–29, 2012. e annual ICAPS conference series was formed in 2003 through the merger of two pre- existing biennial conferences, the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS) and the European Con- ference on Planning (ECP). ICAPS continues the traditional high standards of AIPS and ECP as an archival forum for new research in the field of automated planning and scheduling.
On Computing Conformant Plans Using Classical Planners: A Generate-And-Complete Approach
Authors: Nguyen Khoi , Tran Vien , Son Tran , Pontelli Enrico
Published: September 2022

The paper illustrates a novel approach to conformant planning using classical planners. The approach relies on two core ideas developed to deal with incomplete information in the initial situation: the use of a classical planner to solve non-classical planning problems, and the reduction of the size of the initial belief state. Differently from previous uses of classical planners to solve non-classical planning problems, the approach proposed in this paper creates a valid plan from a possible plan---by inserting actions into the possible plan and maintaining only one level of non-deterministic choice (i.e., the initial plan being modified). The algorithm can be instantiated with different classical planners---the paper presents the GC[LAMA] implementation, whose classical planner is LAMA. We investigate properties of the approach, including conditions for completeness. GC[LAMA] is empirically evaluated against state-of-the-art conformant planners, using benchmarks from the literature. The experimental results show that GC[LAMA] is superior to other planners, in both performance and scalability. GC[LAMA] is the only planner that can solve the largest instances from several domains. The paper investigates the reasons behind the good performance and the challenges encountered in GC[LAMA].
Automated Planning for Liner Shipping Fleet Repositioning
Authors: Tierney Kevin , Coles Amanda , Coles Andrew , Kroer Christian , Britt Adam , Jensen Rune
Published: September 2022

The Liner Shipping Fleet Repositioning Problem (LSFRP) poses a large financial burden on liner shipping firms. During repositioning, vessels are moved between services in a liner shipping network. The LSFRP is characterized by chains of interacting activities, many of which have costs that are a function of their duration; for example, sailing slowly between two ports is cheaper than sailing quickly. Despite its great industrial importance, the LSFRP has received little attention in the literature. We show how the LSFRP can be solved sub-optimally using the planner POPF and optimally with a mixed-integer program (MIP) and a novel method called Temporal Optimization Planning (TOP). We evaluate the performance of each of these techniques on a dataset of real-world instances from our industrial collaborator, and show that automated planning scales to the size of problems faced by industry.
The Application of Automated Planning to Machine Tool Calibration
Authors: Parkinson Simon , Longstaff Andrew , Crampton Andrew , Gregory Peter
Published: September 2022

Engineering companies working with machine tools will often be required to calibrate those machines to international standards. The calibration process requires various errors in the machine to be measured by a skilled expert. In addition to conducting the tests, the engineer must also plan the order in which the tests should take place, and also which instruments should be used to perform each test. It is critical to find as short a calibration plan as possible so that the machine is not out of service for too long. In this work, automated planning is applied to the problem of generating machine tool calibration plans. Given a description of a machine, and its various axes, we produce a calibration plan that minimises the time taken to measure all of the errors of a machine. We also consider the case when there is not enough time to test all errors of the machine, and the calibration plan must maximise the importance of the set of errors tested in the limited time available.