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Specializing TEmporal Planning using Reinforcement Learning

Project description

Specialising temporal planning automatically with AI

Effective planning is essential for achieving desired objectives, especially when time and constraints play a critical role. Temporal planning focuses on automated strategy generation under such conditions, with applications in fields such as robotics, logistics and flexible production. Despite several advancements the scalability of current general-purpose frameworks remains limited and domain-independent temporal planning struggles with real-world complexity. Meanwhile, domain-specific solutions, though efficient, are costly to develop and difficult to maintain. In this context, the ERC-funded STEP-RL project aims to overcome these challenges by introducing a novel, domain-independent temporal planning approach using reinforcement learning. This framework allows automatic specialisation, enabling temporal planners to adapt and optimise over time, thereby enhancing both efficiency and flexibility in solving complex temporal planning problems.

Objective

"Planning - devising a strategy to achieve a desired objective - is one of the basic forms of intelligence. Temporal planning studies the automated synthesis of strategies when time and temporal constraints matter. Temporal planning is one of the most strategic fields of Artificial Intelligence, with applications in autonomous robotics, logistics, flexible production, and many other fields.

Historically, the research on temporal planning follows a general-purpose framework: a generic engine searches for the strategy by reasoning on the problem statement (i.e. the starting condition and the desired objective), as well as on a formal model of the domain (i.e. the possible actions). Despite substantial progress in the recent years, domain-independent temporal planning still suffers from scalability issues, and fails to deal with real-word problems. The alternative is to devise ad-hoc, domain-specific solutions that, although efficient, are costly to develop, rigid to maintain, and often inapplicable in non-nominal situations.

STEP-RL will study the foundations of a new approach to Temporal Planning, that is domain-independent and efficient at the same time. The idea is to adopt a framework based on Reinforcement Learning, where a domain-independent temporal planner is specialized with respect to the domain at hand. STEP-RL continuously improves its ability to solve temporal planning problems by learning from experience, thus becoming increasingly efficient by means of self-adaptation.

STEP-RL will advance the state of the art in temporal planning beyond the ""efficiency vs flexibility"" dilemma, that I had to personally face in the many industrial projects I worked on."

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2023-STG

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Host institution

FONDAZIONE BRUNO KESSLER
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 493 750,00
Address
VIA SANTA CROCE 77
38122 Trento
Italy

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Region
Nord-Est Provincia Autonoma di Trento Trento
Activity type
Research Organisations
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 493 750,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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