AI Planning-Based Service Modeling for the Internet of Things

Abstract: It is estimated that by 2020, more than 50 billion devices will be interconnected, to form what is called the Internet of Things. Those devices range from consumer electronics to utility meters, including vehicles. Provided with sensory capabilities, those objects will be able to transmit valuable information about their environment, not only to humans, but even more importantly to other machines, which should ultimately be able to interpret and take decisions based on the information received. This “smartness” implies gifting those devices with a certain degree of automation. This Master’s Thesis investigates how recent advances in artificial intelligence planning can be helpful in building such systems. In particular, an artificial intelligence planner able to generate workflows for most of IoT-related use cases has been connected to an IoT platform. A performance study of a state-of-the planner, Fast Downward, on one of the most challenging IoT application, Smart Garbage Collection (which is similar to the Traveling Salesman Problem) has also been carried out. Eventually, different pre-processing and clustering techniques are suggested to tackle the latest AI planners’ inefficiency on quickly finding plans for the most difficult tasks.