15-889 AI Planning, Execution, and Learning
Syllabus - Course description and topics


SUMMARY:
In this course we will teach the challenges of building autonomous agents that need to continuously plan, execute their actions, and learn from their interactions with the environment.
In its essence, the autonomous agents need to "select actions" to achieve its objectives (and act, and monitor their execution, etc).

Questions of study in AI planning include: How to represent and change the planning action model? How to generate plans efficiently? How to produce plans of good quality? How to deal with the uncertainty of the world? How to dynamically combine planning, scheduling, and execution?

This course will cover in depth the main issues and algorithms in AI planning and learning, namely action and task modelling and representation, plan generation algorithms, heuristic learning and reuse of experience, and largely open research topics, such as dynamic integration of planning, scheduling, and execution, and multiagent planning.


EVALUATION:

This is a lecture course. There is no textbook, but students will study research papers and use existing planners. There will be homeworks, programming projects, and a final exam.


CONTENTS: The course will be divided into the following main parts:

I. Deliberative Planning

II. Planning under Uncertainty III. Plan Execution IV. Planning and Execution under Uncertainty