. A constraint satisfaction problem involves finding values for variables subject to constraints on which combinations of values are allowed. In some cases it may be impossible or impractical to solve these problems completely. We may seek to partially solve the problem, in particular by satisfying a maximal number of constraints. Standard backtracking and local consistency techniques for solving constraint satisfaction problems can be adapted to cope with, and take advantage of, the differences between partial and complete constraint satisfaction. Extensive experimentation on maximal satisfaction problems illuminates the relative and absolute effectiveness of these methods. A general model of partial constraint satisfaction is proposed. 1 Introduction Constraint satisfaction involves finding values for problem variables subject to constraints on acceptable combinations of values. Constraint satisfaction has wide application in artificial intelligence, in areas ranging from temporal r...

In recent years research in the planning community has moved increasingly towards application of planners to realistic problems involving both time and many types of resources. For example, interest in planning demonstrated by the space research community has inspired work in observation scheduling, planetary rover exploration and spacecraft control domains. Other temporal and resource-intensive domains including logistics planning, plant control and manufacturing have also helped to focus the community on the modelling and reasoning issues that must be confronted to make planning technology meet the challenges of application. The International Planning Competitions have acted as an important motivating force behind the progress that has been made in planning since 1998. The third competition (held in 2002) set the planning community the challenge of handling time and numeric resources. This necessitated the development of a modelling language capable of expressing temporal and numeric properties of planning domains. In this paper we describe the language, pddl2.1, that was used in the competition. We describe the syntax of the language, its formal semantics and the validation of concurrent plans. We observe that pddl2.1 has considerable modelling power — exceeding the capabilities of current planning technology — and presents a number of important challenges to the research community.

A large variety of problems in Artificial Intelligence and other areas of computer science can be viewed as a special case of the constraint satisfaction problem. Some examples are machine vision, belief maintenance, scheduling, temporal reasoning, graph problems, floor plan design, planning genetic experiments, and the satisfiability problem. A number of different approaches have been developed for solving these problems. Some of them use constraint propagation to simplify the original problem. Others use backtracking to directly search for possible solutions. Some are a combination of these two techniques. This paper presents a brief overview of many of these approaches in a tutorial fashion.

problem (csp), namely, naive backtracking (BT), backjumping (BJ), conflict-directed backjumping

tschiexOtoulouse.inra.fr fargierOirit.fr verfailOcert.fr In order to deal with over-constrained Constraint Satisfaction Problems, various extensions of the CSP framework have been considered by taking into account costs, uncertainties, preferences, priorities...Each extension uses a specific mathematical operator (+, max...) to aggregate constraint violations. In this paper, we consider a simple algebraic framework, related to Partial Constraint Satisfaction, which subsumes most of these proposals and use it to characterize existing proposals in terms of rationality and computational complexity. We exhibit simple relationships between these proposals, try to

. Probabilistic inference algorithms for belief updating, finding the most probable explanation, the maximum a posteriori hypothesis, and the maximum expected utility are reformulated within the bucket elimination framework. This emphasizes the principles common to many of the algorithms appearing in the probabilistic inference literature and clarifies the relationship of such algorithms to nonserial dynamic programming algorithms. A general method for combining conditioning and bucket elimination is also presented. For all the algorithms, bounds on complexity are given as a function of the problem's structure. 1. Overview Bucket elimination is a unifying algorithmic framework that generalizes dynamic programming to accommodate algorithms for many complex problemsolving and reasoning activities, including directional resolution for propositional satisfiability (Davis and Putnam, 1960), adaptive consistency for constraint satisfaction (Dechter and Pearl, 1987), Fourier and Gaussian el...

Bucket elimination is an algorithmic framework that generalizes dynamic programming to accommodate many problem-solving and reasoning tasks. Algorithms such as directional-resolution for propositional satisfiability, adaptive-consistency for constraint satisfaction, Fourier and Gaussian elimination for solving linear equalities and inequalities, and dynamic programming for combinatorial optimization, can all be accommodated within the bucket elimination framework. Many probabilistic inference tasks can likewise be expressed as bucket-elimination algorithms. These include: belief updating, finding the most probable explanation, and expected utility maximization. These algorithms share the same performance guarantees; all are time and space exponential in the inducedwidth of the problem's interaction graph. While elimination strategies have extensive demands on memory, a contrasting class of algorithms called "conditioning search" require only linear space. Algorithms in this class split a problem into subproblems by instantiating a subset of variables, called a conditioning set, or a cutset. Typical examples of conditioning search algorithms are: backtracking (in constraint satisfaction), and branch and bound (for combinatorial optimization). The paper presents the bucket-elimination framework as a unifying theme across probabilistic and deterministic reasoning tasks and show how conditioning search can be augmented to systematically trade space for time.

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This paper is a multidisciplinary review of empirical, statistical learning from a graphical model perspective. Well-known examples of graphical models include Bayesian networks, directed graphs representing a Markov chain, and undirected networks representing a Markov field. These graphical models are extended to model data analysis and empirical learning using the notation of plates. Graphical operations for simplifying and manipulating a problem are provided including decomposition, differentiation, and the manipulation of probability models from the exponential family. Two standard algorithm schemas for learning are reviewed in a graphical framework: Gibbs sampling and the expectation maximization algorithm. Using these operations and schemas, some popular algorithms can be synthesized from their graphical specification. This includes versions of linear regression, techniques for feed-forward networks, and learning Gaussian and discrete Bayesian networks from data. The paper conclu...

Many AI problems, when formalized, reduce to evaluating the probability that a propositional expression is true. In this paper we show that this problem is computationally intractable even in surprisingly restricted cases and even if we settle for an approximation to this probability. We consider various methods used in approximate reasoning such as computing degree of belief and Bayesian belief networks, as well as reasoning techniques such as constraint satisfaction and knowledge compilation, that use approximation to avoid computational difficulties, and reduce them to model-counting problems over a propositional domain. We prove that counting satisfying assignments of propositional languages is intractable even for Horn and monotone formulae, and even when the size of clauses and number of occurrences of the variables are extremely limited. This should be contrasted with the case of deductive reasoning, where Horn theories and theories with binary clauses are distinguished by the e...