skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: New Perspectives on Flexibility in Simple Temporal Planning
Flexibility is generally agreed to be a desirable feature of a Simple Temporal Network (STN). However, exactly what flexibility attempts to measure has varied, making it difficult to objectively evaluate flexibility metrics. Further, past metrics tend to lose information or exhibit other undesirable properties when aggregating the flexibility measures of individual events across an entire STN. Our work is driven by the realization that the solution space of an STN is a convex polyhedron whose geometric properties convey useful information about the STN. These geometric inspirations lead to measures of an STN solution space and also motivate a set of desiderata for general flexibility metrics. We also put forth two new geometrically-inspired flexibility metrics that have some theoretical advantages over existing metrics. Finally, we comprehensively evaluate both new and existing flexibility metrics against our proposed desiderata.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1651822
PAR ID:
10056809
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Editor(s):
de_Weerdt, Mathijs; Koenig, Sven; Röger, Gabriele; Spaan, Matthijs
Publisher / Repository:
AAAI Press
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling
Volume:
28
ISSN:
2334-0835
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
Simple Temporal Network Flexible Temporal Planning Flexible Scheduling Geometrically-Inspired
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Benton, J; Lipovetzky, Nir; Onaindia, Eva; Smith, David E; Srivastava, Siddharth (Ed.)
    Flexibility is a useful and common metric for measuring the amount of slack in a Simple Temporal Network (STN) solution space. We extend this concept to specific schedules within an STN’s solution space, developing a related notion of durability that captures an individual schedule’s ability to withstand disturbances and still remain valid. We identify practical sources of scheduling disturbances that motivate the need for durable schedules, and create a geometricallyinspired empirical model that enables testing a given schedule’s ability to withstand these disturbances. We develop a number of durability metrics and use these to characterize and compute specific schedules that we expect to have high durability. Using our model of disturbances, we show that our durability metrics strongly predict a schedule’s resilience to practical scheduling disturbances. We also demonstrate that the schedules we identify as having high durability are up to three times more resilient to disturbances than an arbitrarily chosen schedule is. 
    more » « less
  2. Abstract Biodiversity is believed to be closely related to ecosystem functions. However, the ability of existing biodiversity measures, such as species richness and phylogenetic diversity, to predict ecosystem functions remains elusive. Here, we propose a new vector of diversity metrics, structural diversity, which directly incorporates niche space in measuring ecosystem structure. We hypothesize that structural diversity will provide better predictive ability of key ecosystem functions than traditional biodiversity measures. Using the new lidar-derived canopy structural diversity metrics on 19 National Ecological Observation Network forested sites across the USA, we show that structural diversity is a better predictor of key ecosystem functions, such as productivity, energy, and nutrient dynamics than existing biodiversity measures (i.e. species richness and phylogenetic diversity). Similar to existing biodiversity measures, we found that the relationships between structural diversity and ecosystem functions are sensitive to environmental context. Our study indicates that structural diversity may be as good or a better predictor of ecosystem functions than species richness and phylogenetic diversity. 
    more » « less
  3. null (Ed.)
    Design variety metrics measure how much a design space is explored. We propose that a generalized class of entropy measures based on Sharma-Mittal entropy offers advantages over existing methods to measure design variety. We show that an exemplar metric from Sharma-Mittal entropy, which we call the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index for Design (HHID) has the following desirable advantages over existing metrics: (a) More Accuracy: It better aligns with human ratings compared to existing and commonly used tree-based metrics for two new datasets; (b) Higher Sensitivity: It has higher sensitivity compared to existing methods when distinguishing between the variety of sets; (c) Allows Efficient Optimization: It is a submodular function, which enables us to optimize design variety using a polynomial-time greedy algorithm; and (d) Generalizes to Multiple Measures: The parametric nature of this metric allows us to fit the metric to better represent variety for new domains. The paper also contributes a procedure for comparing metrics used to measure variety via constructing ground truth datasets from pairwise comparisons. Overall, our results shed light on some qualities that good design variety metrics should possess and the non-trivial challenges associated with collecting the data needed to measure those qualities. 
    more » « less
  4. Networked observational data presents new opportunities for learning individual causal effects, which plays an indispensable role in decision making. Such data poses the challenge of confounding bias. Previous work presents two desiderata to handle confounding bias. On the treatment group level, we aim to balance the distributions of confounder representations. On the individual level, it is desirable to capture patterns of hidden confounders that predict treatment assignments. Existing methods show the potential of utilizing network information to handle confounding bias, but they only try to satisfy one of the two desiderata. This is because the two desiderata seem to contradict each other. When the two distributions of confounder representations are highly overlapped, then we confront the undiscriminating problem between the treated and the controlled. In this work, we formulate the two desiderata as a minimax game. We propose IGNITE that learns representations of confounders from networked observational data, which is trained by a minimax game to achieve the two desiderata. Experiments verify the efficacy of IGNITE on two datasets under various settings. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    Abstract The uniformization and hyperbolization transformations formulated by Bonk et al. in “Uniformizing Gromov Hyperbolic Spaces” , Astérisque, vol 270 (2001), dealt with geometric properties of metric spaces. In this paper we consider metric measure spaces and construct a parallel transformation of measures under the uniformization and hyperbolization procedures. We show that if a locally compact roughly starlike Gromov hyperbolic space is equipped with a measure that is uniformly locally doubling and supports a uniformly local p -Poincaré inequality, then the transformed measure is globally doubling and supports a global p -Poincaré inequality on the corresponding uniformized space. In the opposite direction, we show that such global properties on bounded locally compact uniform spaces yield similar uniformly local properties for the transformed measures on the corresponding hyperbolized spaces. We use the above results on uniformization of measures to characterize when a Gromov hyperbolic space, equipped with a uniformly locally doubling measure supporting a uniformly local p -Poincaré inequality, carries nonconstant globally defined p -harmonic functions with finite p -energy. We also study some geometric properties of Gromov hyperbolic and uniform spaces. While the Cartesian product of two Gromov hyperbolic spaces need not be Gromov hyperbolic, we construct an indirect product of such spaces that does result in a Gromov hyperbolic space. This is done by first showing that the Cartesian product of two bounded uniform domains is a uniform domain. 
    more » « less