Founded in 1460, the University of Basel is the oldest university in Switzerland with a history of success going back over 560 years. Today, it has around 13,000 students from over 100 nations, including 2,800 PhD students.
The University of Basel comprises seven faculties covering a wide spectrum of academic disciplines. In international rankings, it is regularly placed among the 100 top universities in the world thanks to its research achievements.
Fast Downward is one of the most successful planning systems for the so-called “classical” scenario, where the system has full information about the relevant parts of the world, the actions are applied consecutively and all action applications are assumed to yield the intended result.
For example, in a household robot scenario, the system knows the exact location of all items in the house and if the robot attempts to lift a mug, the further execution of the plan presumes that it afterwards actually carries the mug and did not for example slip off.
The restriction to this simplemost setting permits faster algorithms than for example possible in the presence of durative action, which can be executed in parallel, or probabilistic actions with several possible outcomes.
The University of Basel leads the development of the Fast Downward planning system. As experts in planning, we know that there is a large number of excellent planning systems for all kinds of requirements. Still, they are not yet used in practice to the extent they should be. One obvious obstacle is that the planning world can be quite confusing at first glance and if a user has committed to a certain system, it can require significant effort to try out an alternative.
The AIPlan4EU project will help to overcome these challenges with a unified planning framework and implementing planning as a service. We are happy to co-shape these efforts with our expertise and to make the Fast Downward system easily available through these innovations.
Role in the project: As one of the project’s research partners, UNIBAS will contribute to the Classical Planning Integration as well as lead the Dissemination and Communication part of the project.
To learn more about the University of Basel, please visit their website: www.unibas.ch