Exam Calendar

First Session (January 2024)

• • Written exam: 23/01/2024, 15:00, Room A5 @ DIAG (via Ariosto 25)

    • Reservation period: 24 Dec 2023 - 19 Jan 2024 on Infostud

  • Project discussion: 26/01/2024, 15:00, Room B101 @ DIAG (via Ariosto 25)

    • Reservation period: 24 Dec 2023 - 22 Jan 2024 through project submission on Google Classroom

Second Session (February 2024)

• • Written exam: 20/02/2024, 15:00, Room A5 @ DIAG (via Ariosto 25)

    • Reservation period: 24 Jan 2024 - 16 Feb 2024 on Infostud

  • Project discussion: 22/02/2024, 15:00, Room B203 @ DIAG (via Ariosto 25)

    • Reservation period: 24 Jan 2023 - 19 Feb 2024 through project submission on Google Classroom

Third Session (March 2024)

• • Written exam: 18/03/2024, 12:30, Room A4 @ DIAG (via Ariosto 25)

    • Reservation period: TBD on infostud

  • Project discussion: 22/03/2024, 15:00, Room B203 @ DIAG (via Ariosto 25)

    • Reservation period: 29 Feb 2024 - 19 March 2024 through project submission on Google Classroom

Exam Rules

For students of previous academic years (2022/23 and earlier): 

• Students enrolled in the year 2021/2022 and before who attended the course in year 2022/2023 and before can still take the exam with the previous professor (Prof. Paolo Liberatore), with the old exam format. Have a look at: http://www.diag.uniroma1.it/liberato/planning/

For students of then current academic year (2023/24): 

The exam consists of 2 parts: 

• A project (max 2 people)

• A written examination (2h)

The final mark of the exam is obtained as a weighted average of the two parts (project: 1/3, written exam: 2/3) and will be registered only when both parts have been passed. The mark for each part will be valid for the entire A.Y., until the session of October 2024, included. After then, all marks will be cleared. 

Projects

P&R projects consist in developing a planning model in PDDL and implementing it through one of the planning systems investigated during the course. The model should be able to solve a realistic problem.  Student may propose their own problems following the instructions on Google Classroom, and are actually encouraged to do so.  Projects must be discussed and approved by the teachers before being submitted and presented. 

Proposing and working on a project

The project consists of the following steps:

• Define a realistic problem (with similar complexity to the ones analyzed during the lectures) in natural language to be solved using PDDL planning.

• Specify a planning domain and at least five planning problems in PDDL, relying (if needed) on the features provided by ADL.

• Solve the planning specification using one of the many PDDL planners from international planning competitions. These include sequential satisficing (non-optimizing) planners, sequential optimizing planners, and other types of planners. We suggest using Fast-Downward or Planning.Domains for your experiments.

• Test your solution using at least three search heuristics, preferably among the ones investigated in the range of the course. Note that only a few heuristics (for example, the BLIND heuristic of Fast Downward) fully support ADL and conditional effects. Therefore, changing the heuristics may force you to renounce to some ADL features, requiring you to "downgrade" your planning specification towards a STRIPS-like formulation.

Project rules

• Projects can be done individually or in a group of a maximum of 2 people.

• You have to submit a project proposal in PDF following the instructions on Google Classroom. In the project proposal indicate the group's composition and the proposal content. In the content specify all the details about your project, namely: (i) the domain chosen described in natural language, (ii) the five instances of the problem that you want to solve, (iii) the planners you intend to use, (iv) the heuristics that you want to use. It may be that some details will change while you are working on the project. If you do some changes to the original proposal you have to discuss them at the presentation. We expect at least the domain chosen and the problem instances to remain the same.

• After that, wait for your project to be accepted. If the project proposal is accepted, you can start working on that. If rejected, do not worry; we will suggest how to modify your idea to make it suitable for a project.

• The project presentation will be given on selected dates defined by the professors. Each group will have to present the project.

• The presentation must be supported using slides. It should be targeted to explain the rationale behind the PDDL planning specification and discuss the (potentially) different results obtained by applying the three selected search heuristics.

Some student projects