Chapter 34. Stochastic Boolean Satisfiability

Stochastic satisfiability (SSAT) is an extension of satisfiability (SAT) that merges two important areas of artificial intelligence: logic and probabilistic reasoning. Initially suggested by Papadimitriou, who called it a “game against nature”, SSAT is interesting both from a theoretical perspective–it is complete for PSPACE, an important complexity class–and from a practical perspective–a broad class of probabilistic planning problems can be encoded and solved as SSAT instances. This chapter describes SSAT and its variants, their computational complexity, applications of SSAT, analytical results, algorithms and empirical results, related work, and directions for future work.

The problem of optimal planning of a complex system on a coordination mechanism with intervals

The article discusses the problem of optimal planning using mean values ​​and variances, which implements the principle of stochastic planning, in which a certain (final) plan is formed by the beginning of the planning period, and then only a probable (preliminary) plan. A decomposition analysis of this problem is presented to identify algorithms for the functioning of a system of models of definite probabilistic planning. As an approximate method for solving the problem, a coordination mechanism with intervals is proposed.

Bridging the Gap Between Probabilistic Model Checking and Probabilistic Planning: Survey, Compilations, and Empirical Comparison

Markov decision processes are of major interest in the planning community as well as in the model checking community. But in spite of the similarity in the considered formal models, the development of new techniques and methods happened largely independently in both communities. This work is intended as a beginning to unite the two research branches. We consider goal-reachability analysis as a common basis between both communities. The core of this paper is the translation from Jani, an overarching input language for quantitative model checkers, into the probabilistic planning domain definition language (PPDDL), and vice versa from PPDDL into Jani. These translations allow the creation of an overarching benchmark collection, including existing case studies from the model checking community, as well as benchmarks from the international probabilistic planning competitions (IPPC). We use this benchmark set as a basis for an extensive empirical comparison of various approaches from the model checking community, variants of value iteration, and MDP heuristic search algorithms developed by the AI planning community. On a per benchmark domain basis, techniques from one community can achieve state-ofthe-art performance in benchmarks of the other community. Across all benchmark domains of one community, the performance comparison is however in favor of the solvers and algorithms of that particular community. Reasons are the design of the benchmarks, as well as tool-related limitations. Our translation methods and benchmark collection foster crossfertilization between both communities, pointing out specific opportunities for widening the scope of solvers to different kinds of models, as well as for exchanging and adopting algorithms across communities.