Damien Pellier

Research Interests

My research is in Artificial Intelligence but specially automated planning and scheduling, distributed planning, cooperative distributed problem solving and coordination, multiagent systems and recently inmachine learning.

Automated planning is a branch of artificial intelligence that concerns the realisation of strategies or action sequences, typically for execution by intelligent agents, autonomous robots and unmanned vehicles.

A typical planner takes three inputs: a description of the initial state of the world, a description of the desired goal, and a set of possible actions, all encoded in a formal language such as STRIPS. The planner produces a sequence of actions that lead from the initial state to a state meeting the goal. The difficulty of planning is dependent on the simplifying assumptions employed, e.g. atomic time, deterministic time, complete observabi lity, etc. Classical planners make all these assumptions and have been studied most fully.

Distributed planning is concerned with planning by (and for) multiple agents. It can involve agents planning for a common goal, an agent coordinating the plans (plan merging) or planning of others, or agents refining their own plans while negotiating over tasks or resources. The topic also involves how agents can do this in real time while executing plans (distributed continual planning).