Evgeny Mishlyakov, Mikhail Gruntov, Alexander Shleyfman, E. Karpas
{"title":"A Deterministic Search Approach for Solving Stochastic Drone Search and Rescue Planning Without Communications","authors":"Evgeny Mishlyakov, Mikhail Gruntov, Alexander Shleyfman, E. Karpas","doi":"10.1609/socs.v17i1.31544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v17i1.31544","url":null,"abstract":"In disaster relief efforts, delivering aid to areas with no communication poses a significant challenge. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be utilized to deliver aid kits to survivors in hard-to-reach areas; unfortunately, in some areas, lack of communication and infrastructure presents a key problem. \u0000In this paper, we address a stochastic planning problem of planning for a set of UAVs that deliver aid kits to areas that lack communications, where we do not know in advance the locations where aid kits need to be delivered, but rather have probabilistic information about the locations of aid targets.\u0000Our main insight is that, despite the stochastic nature of this problem, we can solve it through deterministic search by monitoring the expected reward for each partial solution. This insight enables the application of deterministic planning techniques, empirically demonstrating a notable improvement in efficiency and response speed. Our approach presents a promising solution to addressing the challenge of delivering aid in regions with limited radio infrastructure, as well as similar planning problems.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"51 24","pages":"73-81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141277175","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sean Mariasin, Andrew Coles, E. Karpas, Wheeler Ruml, S. E. Shimony, Shahaf S. Shperberg
{"title":"Evaluating Distributional Predictions of Search Time: Put Up or Shut Up Games (Extended Abstract)","authors":"Sean Mariasin, Andrew Coles, E. Karpas, Wheeler Ruml, S. E. Shimony, Shahaf S. Shperberg","doi":"10.1609/socs.v17i1.31579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v17i1.31579","url":null,"abstract":"Metareasoning can be a helpful technique for controlling search in situations where computation time is an important resource, such as \u0000real-time planning and search, algorithm portfolios, and concurrent planning and execution. Metareasoning often involves an estimate of the remaining search time of a running algorithm, and several ways to compute such estimates have been presented in the literature. In this paper, we argue that many applications actually require a full estimated probability distribution over the remaining time, rather than just a point estimate of expected search time. We study several methods for estimating such distributions, including some novel adaptations of existing schemes.\u0000To properly evaluate the estimates, we introduce `put-up or shut-up games', which probe the distributional estimates without requiring infeasible computation.\u0000Our experimental evaluation reveals that estimates that are more accurate in expected value do not necessarily deliver better distributions, yielding worse scores in the game.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"30 4","pages":"277-278"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141274347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Neural Sequence Generation with Constraints via Beam Search with Cuts: A Case Study on VRP","authors":"Pouya Shati, Eldan Cohen, Sheila A. McIlraith","doi":"10.1609/socs.v17i1.31549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v17i1.31549","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, neural sequence models have been applied successfully to solve combinatorial optimization problems. Solutions, encoded as sequences, are typically generated from trained models via beam search, a search algorithm that generates sequences token-by-token while keeping a fixed number of promising partial solutions at each step. In this paper, we explore the problem of augmenting beam search generation with the enforcement of requirements---hard constraints that any generated solution must adhere to. We propose a hybrid approach, by encoding the requirements in the form of a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) and iteratively solving the CSP to cut any partial solution within the beam search that is incapable of satisfying the requirements. We study this problem in the context of vehicle routing problems (VRP) further augmented with capacity-related or temporal requirements. We experimentally show that cuts often allow us to satisfy the requirements with negligible impact on solution quality. Without the use of cuts, beam search is shown to be exponentially less likely to satisfy the requirements as the length of the solution increases and/or the requirements are strengthened.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"5 11","pages":"118-126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141277714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Parallelizing Multi-objective A* Search (Extended Abstract)","authors":"Saman Ahmadi","doi":"10.1609/socs.v17i1.31567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v17i1.31567","url":null,"abstract":"The Multi-objective Shortest Path (MOSP) problem aims to find all Pareto-optimal paths between two points in a graph with multiple edge costs. Recent studies on multi-objective search with A* have demonstrated superior performance in solving difficult MOSP instances. This paper proposes a novel parallel multi-objective search framework that can accelerate recent A*-based solutions by several factors.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"55 1","pages":"253-254"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141280977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Clemens Büchner, Remo Christen, Salomé Eriksson, Thomas Keller
{"title":"Hitting Set Heuristics for Overlapping Landmarks in Satisficing Planning","authors":"Clemens Büchner, Remo Christen, Salomé Eriksson, Thomas Keller","doi":"10.1609/socs.v17i1.31558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v17i1.31558","url":null,"abstract":"Landmarks are a core component of LAMA, a state-of-the-art satisficing planning\u0000system based on heuristic search. It uses landmarks to estimate the goal\u0000distance by summing up the costs of their cheapest achievers. This procedure\u0000ignores synergies between different landmarks: The cost of an action is\u0000counted multiple times if it is the cheapest achiever of several landmarks.\u0000Common admissible landmark heuristics tackle this problem by\u0000underapproximating the cost of a minimum hitting set of the landmark\u0000achievers. We suggest to overapproximate it by computing suboptimal hitting\u0000sets instead if admissibility is not a requirement. As our heuristics consider\u0000synergies between landmarks, we further propose to relax certain restrictions\u0000LAMA imposes on the number of landmarks and synergies between them. Our\u0000experimental evaluation shows a reasonable increase in the number of\u0000landmarks that leads to better guidance when used with our new heuristics.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"25 2","pages":"198-202"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141274188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Quality Diversity Approach to Automatically Generate Multi-Agent Path Finding Benchmark Maps (Extended Abstract)","authors":"Cheng Qian, Yulun Zhang, Jiaoyang Li","doi":"10.1609/socs.v17i1.31580","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v17i1.31580","url":null,"abstract":"Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a complex problem aiming at searching for paths where teams of agents navigate to their goal locations without collisions. Recent advancements in MAPF have highlighted the necessity for robust benchmarks to evaluate their performance. Previously, the benchmarks used to evaluate MAPF algorithms are predominantly fixed, human-designed maps, which cannot evaluate the behavior of the algorithms comprehensively, leading to potential failures in diverse map scenarios. Meanwhile, quality diversity (QD) algorithm is used to generate maps of high solution quality for MAPF. We employ this technique to automatically generate diverse benchmark maps and explore the detailed behavior of MAPF algorithms in the generated maps. As a preliminary result, we concentrate on EECBS, a popular sub-optimal MAPF algorithm, and observe several findings regarding the runtime and solution quality of EECBS, and difficulty of the generated maps.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"24 6","pages":"279-280"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141280321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Takehide Soh, Tomoya Tanjo, Yoshio Okamoto, Takehiro Ito
{"title":"CoRe Challenge 2022/2023: Empirical Evaluations for Independent Set Reconfiguration Problems (Extended Abstract)","authors":"Takehide Soh, Tomoya Tanjo, Yoshio Okamoto, Takehiro Ito","doi":"10.1609/socs.v17i1.31583","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v17i1.31583","url":null,"abstract":"In this extended abstract, we describe CoRe Challenge 2022/2023, an international competition series aiming to construct the technical foundation of practical research for Combinatorial Reconfiguration. This competition series targets one of the most well-studied reconfiguration problems, called the independent set reconfiguration problem under the token jumping model, which asks a step-by-step transformation between two given independent sets in a graph. Theoretically, the problem is PSPACE-complete, which implies that there exist instances such that even a shortest transformation requires super-polynomial steps with respect to the input size under the assumption of $NP neq PSPACE$. The competition series consists of four tracks: three tracks take two independent sets of a graph as input, and ask the existence of a transformation, a shortest transformation, a longest transformation between them; and the last track takes only a number of vertices as input, and asks for an instance of the specified number of vertices that needs a longer shortest transformation steps. We describe the background of the competition series and highlight the results of the solver and graph tracks.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"61 16","pages":"285-286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141277040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Multi-Agent Path Execution with Uncertainty","authors":"Yihao Liu, Xueyan Tang, Wentong Cai, Jingning Li","doi":"10.1609/socs.v17i1.31543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v17i1.31543","url":null,"abstract":"In real-world multi-agent applications, unexpected conditions can break the assumptions made in path planning and degrade the effectiveness of path execution. This paper studies robust and effective execution of multi-agent path plans under uncertainty. To guarantee conflict-freeness and deadlock-freeness, we define a feasibility problem to check whether the remaining portion of a path plan can be successfully executed. We prove that the problem is NP-complete and propose a feasibility test algorithm. We further develop algorithms to coordinate the agents online and have as many of them as possible moving concurrently to maximize the effectiveness of execution. We experimentally demonstrate the path execution effectiveness and computational efficiency of our algorithms.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"60 8","pages":"64-72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141274644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Anas El Kouaiti, Francesco Percassi, A. Saetti, T. McCluskey, M. Vallati
{"title":"Deployable Yet Effective Traffic Signal Optimisation via Automated Planning (Extended Abstract)","authors":"Anas El Kouaiti, Francesco Percassi, A. Saetti, T. McCluskey, M. Vallati","doi":"10.1609/socs.v17i1.31575","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v17i1.31575","url":null,"abstract":"The use of planning techniques in traffic signal optimisation has proven effective in managing unexpected traffic conditions as well as typical traffic patterns. However, significant challenges concerning the deployability of generated signal plans remain, as planning systems need to consider constraints and features of the actual real-world infrastructure on which they will be implemented. \u0000\u0000To address this challenge, we introduce a range of PDDL+ models embodying technological requirements as well as insights from domain experts. The proposed models have been extensively tested on historical data using a range of well-known search strategies and heuristics, as well as alternative encodings. Results demonstrate their competitiveness with the state of the art.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"16 8","pages":"269-270"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141279622","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spectral Clustering in Rule-based Algorithms for Multi-agent Path Finding (Extended Abstract)","authors":"Irene Saccani, Kristýna Janovská, Pavel Surynek","doi":"10.1609/socs.v17i1.31581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v17i1.31581","url":null,"abstract":"We address rule-based algorithms for multi-agent path finding (MAPF). MAPF is a task of finding non-conflicting paths connecting agents' initial and goal positions in a shared environment specified via an undirected graph. Rule-based algorithms use a fixed set of predefined primitive operations to move agents to their goal positions in a complete manner. We propose to apply spectral clustering on the underlying graph to decompose the graph into highly connected components and move agents to their goal cluster first before the rule-based algorithm is applied. The benefit of this approach is twofold: (1) the rule-based algorithms are often more efficient on highly connected clusters and (2) we can potentially run the algorithms in parallel on individual clusters.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"14 8","pages":"281-282"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141280847","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}