With computers now present in everyday devices like mobile phones,
credit cards, cars and planes or places like homes, offices and
factories, the trend is to build embedded complex systems from a
collection of simple components. For example, a complex smart house system
can be ``realised'' (i.e., implemented) by suitably coordinating the behaviours
(i.e., the operational logic) of hundreds (or thousands) of simple devices
and artifacts installed in the house, such as lights, blinds, game consoles,
a vacuum cleaner, video cameras, audio systems, TVs, a floor cleaning robot, etc.
The problem of automatically synthesising, that is, building, an effective
coordinator controller for a given desired target system is called the
behaviour composition problem and is the focus of this talk. The composition
task can be recast in a variety of domains, including robot ecologies,
ubiquitous robots or intelligent spaces, web-services, component-based
development (CBD), agent programming, and automated planning.
The talk will cover the standard formalization of the problem, several
extensions proposed, and the main computational techniques proposed.
Importantly, the behavior composition problem draws from various areas of Artificial
Intelligence and Computer Science, including verification, reasoning about
action, web-services, and generalized planning.
A main reference for this work is the following one:
Giuseppe De Giacomo, Fabio Patrizi, Sebastian Sardiña:
Automatic behavior composition synthesis. Artificial Intelligence 196: 106-142 (2013)
This is joint work done with Prof. Giuseppe De Giacomo and Dr. Fabio
Patrizi (Sapienza University, Italy) and Dr. Nitin Yadav
(Melbourne University, Australia).