Exploration policies for on-the-fly controller synthesis: a reinforcement learning approach
File(s)Learning_Synthesis-2.pdf (1.35 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Delgado, Tomas
Sanchez Sorondo, Marco
Braberman, Victor
Uchitel, Sebastian
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Controller synthesis is in essence a case of model-based planning for non-deterministic environments in which plans (actually “strategies”) are meant to preserve system goals indefinitely. In the case of supervisory control environments are specified as the parallel composition of state machines and valid strategies are required to be “non-blocking” (i.e., always enabling the environment to reach certain marked states) in addition to safe (i.e., keep the system within a safe zone). Recently, On-the-fly Directed Controller Synthesis techniques were proposed to avoid the exploration of the entire -and exponentially large- environment space, at the cost of non-maximal permissiveness, to either find a strategy or conclude that there is none. The incremental exploration of the plant is currently guided by a domain-independent human-designed heuristic. In this work, we propose a new method for obtaining heuristics based on Reinforcement Learning (RL). The synthesis algorithm is thus framed as an RL task with an unbounded action space and a modified version of DQN is used. With a simple and general set of features that abstracts both states and actions, we show that it is possible to learn heuristics on small versions of a problem that generalize to the larger instances, effectively doing zero-shot policy transfer. Our agents learn from scratch in a highly partially observable RL task and outperform the existing heuristic overall, in instances unseen during training.
Date Issued
2023-07-01
Date Acceptance
2023-02-28
Citation
Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, 2023, 33 (1), pp.569-577
Publisher
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
Start Page
569
End Page
577
Journal / Book Title
Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling
Volume
33
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© 2023, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.
Source
International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2023-07-08
Finish Date
2023-07-13
Coverage Spatial
Prague, Czech Republic