Douglas R. Smith and Eduardo A. Parra. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling. In Mark H. Burstein, editor, ARPA/Rome Laboratory KnowledgeBased Planning and Scheduling Initiative Workshop Proceedings, pages 205--216, Palo Alto, CA, February 1994. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc.  Home/Search   Document Details and Download   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....and creative. Many points on the spectrum from domain independent to knowledge intensive have been explored. Examples of the diverse underlying scheduling techniques are local search (e.g. 2] simulated annealing (e.g. 12] constraint satisfaction (e.g. 4] and transformational (e.g. [7]) to name a few. The problem is choosing the appropriate technique for a specific type of scheduling application. One method for determining the appropriate method is to investigate the generality of particular scheduling algorithms. Studies of single approaches demonstrate the utility and ....

Douglas R. Smith and Eduardo A. Parra. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling. In Mark H. Burstein, editor, ARPA/Rome Laboratory KnowledgeBased Planning and Scheduling Initiative Workshop Proceedings, pages 205--216, Palo Alto, CA, February 1994. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc.

....relations with other refinement search type frameworks, relations with other experimental analyses of planning algorithms and relations with other research efforts to improve explain the performance of partial order planners. 9. 1 Relations with other Refinement Search based frameworks In [36,37], Smith uses a search paradigm called global search to provide a unifying framework for scheduling. His motivation is to attempt to use the global search framework, in conjunction with an interactive software development system (KIDS [38] to synthesize efficient scheduling algorithms for given ....

....paradigm called global search to provide a unifying framework for scheduling. His motivation is to attempt to use the global search framework, in conjunction with an interactive software development system (KIDS [38] to synthesize efficient scheduling algorithms for given problem populations [37]. Global search has several similarities with the refinement search framework discussed in this paper. For example, corresponding to our monotonic auxiliary constraints, Smith s global search has the notion of filters. In addition to the ideas of splitting and pruning , Smith also talks about ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

D.R. Smith and E.A. Parra. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling. In Proc. 8th Knowledge-based software engineering Conference, 1993.

....Development System (KIDS) 1] has yielded some exciting results. KIDS has been used to derive dozens of algorithms including a transportation scheduling algorithm for over 15,000 movements that was 78 percent faster and had 75 percent fewer delays than the best previously known algorithms [2]. A follow on effort to KIDS, Specware [3] supports a systematic approach to the composition of theory based specifications followed by their stepwise refinementinto code. The basic synthesis steps are to 1) develop a domain theory for the problem to be solved, 2) create a specification ....

D. R. Smith, "Transformational Approach to Transportation Scheduling," in Proceedings of the 8th Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference, pp. 60--68, IEEE, October 1993.

....append W a , S, injective W S , a S a range W ( 8 KIDS approach in empirical terms. In these terms, the system has been successful. Its best known application has been in deriving very fast and accurate transportation schedulers for use by the U.S. Transportation Command [47]. Excellent discussions on the application of KIDS to other (simpler and more easily understood) domains, together with complete examples of program derivations, can be found in [44] and [45] Many other generator and transformation systems efforts are directly related to KIDS. The system is ....

D.R. Smith and E.A. Parra, Transformational approach to transportation scheduling, Knowledge-Based Softw. Eng. Conf., 60-68, 1993.

....than on low level inferences of the logical calculus. Algorithm design strategies based on schematic solutions for certain classes of algorithms [38] have proved to be suited best for this purpose since they can be formulated almost entirely in programmer s terminology. It has been demonstrated [39] that algorithm schemata do not only lead to a very efficient synthesis process but can also produce competitive algorithms if properly guided. Formally verified theorems stating the requirements for the correctness of an abstract program scheme [17] are the key for an integration of these ....

D. R. Smith and E. A. Parra. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling. 8 th Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference, pp. 60--68, 1993.

....er Name is used to denote a structure, a type and a function (lines 1, 4 and 7, respectively) Because Opal does not x the order of (dependent) declarations and imports, incremental treatment is not possible. Instead we employ a global search algorithm with constraint propagation in the style of [10, 14], where constraint calculation is performed by a xpoint iteration. The basic principle is that the partial names occurring in a structure are distinguished as being either de ning or applied occurrences. For example, line 6 fun match : String Set[Name] Set[Name] in Program 5 induces one ....

Douglas R. Smith and Eduardo A. Parra. Transformational Approach to Transportation Scheduling. In Proc. 8th Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conf., Chicago, IL, pages 60-68, 1993.

....and Scheduling Technology Over the past several years, Rome Laboratory has been evaluating the use of advanced AI planning and scheduling technology in large, real world applications. This technology has been successfully applied to military transportation and airlift scheduling in the KTS system [19, 20] and ITAS system [2] and nuclear power plant outage management in the ROMAN system [1, 8, 9] In this section, we succintly describe this advanced AI planning and scheduling technology and the different application domains. A central aspect of this technology is the use of a semi automatic ....

....rest of the partial schedule. As previously mentioned, several applications have been developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques in the domains of military transportation and airlift scheduling and nuclear power plant outage management. KTS (Kestrel Transportation Scheduler) [19, 20] was developed mainly as a technology demonstration and used a realistic model of the military transportation scheduling domain for the US Transportation Command. KTS schedules 15,460 individual movement requirements in 71 cpu seconds on a Sparc 2. Furthermore, the resulting schedules produced by ....

Douglas R. Smith, and Eduardo Parra. Transformational Approach to Transportation Scheduling. In Proceedings of the Eighth Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference. Chicago, Illinois, 1993.

....given problem specification. KIDS uses a form of deductive inference called directed inference to reason about the problem specification in order to automatically apply the various transformations [5] KIDS has been successfully used in the derivation of high performance transportation schedulers [6,7,11]. These applications have shown that advanced planning and scheduling technology is beneficial in complex and realistic problem domains. However, the development of a KIDS domain theory, the selection and implementation of a search strategy, and knowing what sequence of transformations to apply to ....

....features that ROMAN provides. Roman generates schedules incorporating very complex constraints as in the safety constraints for AC Power. The constraint model used in ROMAN is more general than the models used in previous scheduling applications using KIDS technology such as KTS and ITAS [6,7,11] particularly with regard to the way Maximum on Ground (MOG) port constraints are handled. ROMAN provides increased robustness in terms of schedules that are feasible over time intervals rather than a single time point as start times. Thus, ROMAN s solution provides a family of schedules rather ....

Smith, Douglas R., and Parra, Eduardo. Transformational Approach to Transportation Scheduling. In Proceedings of the Eighth Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference. Chicago, Illinois, 1993.

....term KIDS approach to denote the concepts that have been implemented in the system KIDS 1 . The KIDS approach has been applied to a number of case studies at Kestrel Institute. In particular, it has been used in the design of a transportation scheduling algorithm with impressive performance [15, 16]. We wished to find out if we were able to use this method based on the available publi 1 We did not use the implemented system KIDS in the case study. cations and produce satisfactory results with reasonable effort. A second goal of this work has been to study how a knowledge based approach ....

....who wish to learn and use them. However, we did not use the KIDS system because we wanted to have full control over the design process and adapt it to our needs if necessary. Transportation scheduling. Our case study relates to the research on design of transportation schedulers at Kestrel [15, 16]. They study schedulers that assign trips to resources like planes, ships, and trucks to meet movement requirements. In this setting, trips fully occupy resources for an interval of time, i.e. the load of a resource cannot be extended during a trip. Furthermore, a trip changes the availability of ....

D. R. Smith and E. A. Parra. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling. In Proc. Eighth Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference, Chicago, September 1993.

....concepts of the approach were used in the case study, and could modify the approach where necessary. The KIDS system has been applied to a number of case studies at Kestrel Institute. In particular, it has been used in the design of a transportation scheduling algorithm with impressive performance [18], 19] We wished to find out if we were able to use this method based on the available publications and produce satisfactory results with reasonable effort. A second goal of this work has been to study how a knowledge based approach can be integrated into the overall software engineering 2 ....

....system kernel, so new ones can be integrated into the system in a routine way. The system Specware [20] under development at Kestrel also seems to allow for a modularized and easily extendible knowledge base. Our case study relates to the research on design of transportation schedulers at Kestrel [18], 19] They study schedulers that assign trips to resources like planes, ships, and trucks to meet movement requirements. In this setting, trips fully occupy resources for an interval of time, i.e. the load of a resource cannot be extended during a trip. Furthermore, a trip changes the ....

D. R. Smith and E. A. Parra. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling. In Proceedings of the Eighth Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference, Chicago, September 1993.

....The synthesized planner can take a planning task such as Sussman Anomaly 1 as input (a task) and return the plan for it (the result) 1.1. Background Part of the reason for our interest in KIDS system stems from the fact that it has been used in the past to derive efficient scheduling software [16]. Using KIDS to derive planning software in CLAY involves figuring out (a) how declarative theories for different types of classical planning are specified and (b) what algorithmic design templates are best suited to planner synthesis. We answer these questions with the help of a unifying ....

D. Smith and E. Parra. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling. In Proceedings of the 8th Knowledgebased Software Engineering Conference, pages 14--17, 1993. Chicago, IL, Sept 1993.

....work, a high level strategy is given and a general simplifier is used for finite differencing of functional programs that takes advantage mainly of distributivity laws. This approach has been implemented in a semi automatic system KIDS and has helped to derive a number of efficient programs [Smi91,SP93] Approaches based on such high level strategies do not provide systematic steps to follow. How to automate such an approach is one of the most challenging issues to be studied. In summary, in most works in the third class, programs are written in very highlevel languages with aggregate data ....

Douglas R. Smith and Eduardo A. Parra. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling. In Proceedings of the 8th Knowledge-Base Software Engineering Conference, Chicago, Illinois, September 1993. IEEE Computer Society Press.

....compilation (e.g. Mostow, 1991; Tong, 1991; Braudaway and Tong, 1989) 36 Several program synthesis systems have been used to generate combinatorial search programs. For instance, kids was used to develop a transportation scheduler that significantly outperforms more general schedulers (Smith and Parra, 1993), illustrating the benefits of domain specific customization. Srinivasan and Sterling (1993) presented a framework for tailoring a generic scheduler to particular scheduling domains. While all of the research projects we have mentioned have addressed the problem of tailoring general algorithms to ....

D. R. Smith and E. A. Parra. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling. In Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Knowledge-Based Software Engineering, 1993.

....independent to knowledge intensive have been explored. Examples of the diverse underlying scheduling techniques are local search (e.g. Drummond, Swanson, Bresina 1994) simulated annealing (e.g. Zweben et al. 1994) constraint satisfaction (e.g. Fox 1994) and transformational (e.g. (Smith Parra 1994)) to name a few. The problem is choosing the appropriate technique for a specific type of scheduling application. One method for determining the appropriate method is to investigate the generality of particular scheduling algorithms. Studies of single approaches demonstrate the utility and ....

....of the order. ISIS uses beam search to schedule backwards from a due date (a primary constraint) to find a good location for the order. Should this prove to be impossible, the due date constraint might be relaxed and the order rescheduled in a forward direction. In a reactive system such as OPIS (Smith 1994), several types of local search are performed to revise schedules. OPIS uses beam search to reschedule a set of operations pertaining to a single order. Another search technique is applied when operations (from multiple orders) conflict on a single resource; a forward dispatch search reschedules ....

Smith, D. R., and Parra, E. A. 1994. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling.

....match relation between generalized and as built specifications. As such, we we do not rely on the existence of a domain library to provide specification matches. 7 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK Specification libraries have been used extensively and with relative success for code derivation [20]. In addition, formal specification libraries are the basis for many software component reuse approaches [23, 12] When used alone, formal approaches to reverse engineering based on the use of strongest postcondition produce asbuilt specifications that suffer from an implementation bias. While ....

D. R. Smith and E. A. Parra. Transformational Approach to Transportation Scheduling. In Proceedings of the 8th Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference, pages 60--68, Sept 1993.

....space [6] While many of these approaches have made significant advances in the area of software reuse, few address the creation of specification libraries. 8 Conclusions and Future Investigations Specification libraries have been used extensively and with relative success for code derivation [20]. In addition, formal specification libraries are the basis for many software component reuse approaches [6, 14, 19, 25] One of the difficulties of using a formal approach to software component reuse is that the assumption of library existence may not be a reasonable one. However, by applying a ....

D. R. Smith and E. A. Parra. Transformational Approach to Transportation Scheduling. In Proceedings of the 18th Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference, pages 60--68, Sept 1993.

....relations with other refinement search type frameworks, relations with other experimental analyses of planning algorithms and relations with other research efforts to improve explain the performance of partial order planners. 9. 1 Relations with other Refinement Search based frameworks In [36,37], Smith uses a search paradigm called global search to provide a unifying framework for scheduling. His motivation is to attempt to use the global search framework, in conjunction with an interactive software development system (KIDS [38] to synthesize efficient scheduling algorithms for given ....

....paradigm called global search to provide a unifying framework for scheduling. His motivation is to attempt to use the global search framework, in conjunction with an interactive software development system (KIDS [38] to synthesize efficient scheduling algorithms for given problem populations [37]. Global search has several similarities with the refinement search framework discussed in this paper. For example, corresponding to our monotonic auxiliary constraints, Smith s global search has the notion of filters. In addition to the ideas of splitting and pruning , Smith also talks about ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

D.R. Smith and E.A. Parra. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling. In Proc. 8th Knowledge-based software engineering Conference, 1993.

....by a formal language [1] 2] Such a representation has many potential benefits, ranging from improvement of the quality of the specification itself to the automatic generation of executable code. While some impressive results have emerged from the utilization of formal specifications [3] [4], the development of formal specifications to represent a user s requirements is still a difficult task. This has restricted adoption of formal specifications by practitioners. On the other hand, an approach to requirements modeling that has been gaining acceptance is the use of object oriented ....

D. R. Smith, "Transformational Approach to Transportation Scheduling," in Proceedings of the 8th Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference, pp. 60--68, IEEE, October 1993.

....illustration comes from the success obtained by tools for program development and verification which have been tailored to particular application domains. As outstanding recent examples one can cite here D. Smith s method for synthesis of high performance transportation scheduling programs [76, 75] and Clarke and Dill s machinery for the verification of programs which can conveniently be mapped to finite state transition systems of manageable size and can be dealt with by automated model checking. Another remarkable example is Russino# s [72] functional definition of an important subset of ....

D.R. Smith and E.A. Parra, Transformational Approach to Transportation Scheduling, in: Proc of the Eighth Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference, IEEE Computer Society Press, September 1993, 60--68.

....[23, 41] While many of these approaches have made significant advances in the area of software reuse, few address the creation of specification libraries. 8 Conclusions and Future Investigations Specification libraries have been used extensively and with relative success for code derivation [43]. In addition, formal specification libraries are the basis for many software component reuse approaches [2, 19, 20, 23, 41] One of the difficulties of using a formal approach to software component reuse is that the assumption of library existence may not be a reasonable one. However, by applying ....

Douglas R. Smith and Eduardo A. Parra. Transformational Approach to Transportation Scheduling. In Proceedings of the 18th Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference, pages 60--68, Sept 1993. A As-built specification for the Queue source code

....than on low level inferences of the logical calculus. Algorithm design strategies based on schematic solutions for certain classes of algorithms [40] have proved to be suited best for this purpose since they can be formulated almost entirely in programmer s terminology. It has been demonstrated [41] that algorithm schemata do not only lead to a very efficient synthesis process but can also produce competitive algorithms if properly guided. Formally verified theorems stating the requirements for the correctness of an abstract program scheme [19] are the key for an integration of these ....

D. R. Smith & E. A. Parra. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling. 8 th Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference, pp. 60--68, 1993.

....logic. Thus, we can only judge the practical value of the KIDS approach in empirical terms. In these terms, the system has had significant success. Its best known application has been in deriving very fast and accurate transportation schedulers for use by the U.S. Transportation Command [38]. Excellent discussions on the application of KIDS to other (simpler and more easily understood) domains, together with complete examples of program derivations, can be found in [36] and [37] Many other generator and transformation systems efforts are directly related to KIDS. The system is built ....

D.R. Smith and E.A. Parra, Transformational approach to transportation scheduling, Knowledge-Based Softw. Eng. Conf., 60-68, 1993.

....1,261 3,557 44 sec 12 096 KS 20,400 4,644 6,183 86 sec 14 9002T Borneo 28,900 10,623 15,119 290 sec 20 Figure 7: KTS Scheduling Statistics 5. 3 KTS Strategic Transportation Scheduling The KTS schedulers synthesized using the KIDS program transformation system are extremely fast and accurate [44, 45]. The chart in Figure 7 lists 4 TPFDD problems, and for each problem (1) the number of TPFDD lines (each requirement line contains up to several hundred fields) 2) the number of individual movement requirements obtained from the TPFDD line (each line can specify several individual movements ....

Smith, D. R., and Parra, E. A. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling. In ARPA/RL Knowledge-Based Planning and Scheduling Initiative: Workshop Proceedings (Tucson, AZ, February 1994), pp. 205--216.

....1,261 3,557 44 sec 12 096 KS 20,400 4,644 6,183 86 sec 14 9002T Borneo 28,900 10,623 15,119 290 sec 20 Figure 7: KTS Scheduling Statistics 5. 3 KTS Strategic Transportation Scheduling The KTS schedulers synthesized using the KIDS program transformation system are extremely fast and accurate [44, 45]. The chart in Figure 7 lists 4 TPFDD problems, and for each problem (1) the number of TPFDD lines (each requirement line contains up to several hundred fields) 2) the number of individual movement requirements obtained from the TPFDD line (each line can specify several individual movements ....

Smith, D. R., and Parra, E. A. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling. In Proceedings of the Eighth Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference (Chicago, IL, September 1993), pp. 60--68.

....scheduling model, and furthermore, during execution the schedule will need to be periodically revised to adapt to unanticipated circumstances. As part of the ARPA Rome Laboratory Planning and Scheduling Initiative, we have focused on the transformational development of transportation schedulers [12, 14]. Our approach involves several stages. The first step is to develop a formal model of the transportation scheduling domain, called a domain theory. Second, the constraints, objectives, and preferences of a particular scheduling problem are stated within a domain theory as a problem ....

Smith, D. R., and Parra, E. A. Transformational approach to transportation scheduling. In Proceedings of the Eighth Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference (Chicago, IL, September 1993), pp. 60--68.

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