Probabilistic Planning with Prioritized Preferences over Temporal Logic Objectives

Probabilistic Planning with Prioritized Preferences over Temporal Logic Objectives

Lening Li, Hazhar Rahmani, Jie Fu

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 189-198. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/22

This paper studies temporal planning in probabilistic environments, modeled as labeled Markov decision processes (MDPs), with user preferences over multiple temporal goals. Existing works reflect such preferences as a prioritized list of goals. This paper introduces a new specification language, termed prioritized qualitative choice linear temporal logic on finite traces, which augments linear temporal logic on finite traces with prioritized conjunction and ordered disjunction from prioritized qualitative choice logic. This language allows for succinctly specifying temporal objectives with corresponding preferences accomplishing each temporal task. The finite traces that describe the system's behaviors are ranked based on their dissatisfaction scores with respect to the formula. We propose a systematic translation from the new language to a weighted deterministic finite automaton. Utilizing this computational model, we formulate and solve a problem of computing an optimal policy that minimizes the expected score of dissatisfaction given user preferences. We demonstrate the efficacy and applicability of the logic and the algorithm on several case studies with detailed analyses for each.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Formal verification, validation and synthesis
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Preference modelling and preference-based reasoning
Planning and Scheduling: PS: Markov decisions processes