Directory

Description

The group studies the languages for representing knowledge and automated reasoning and the main techniques and methodologies for modelling and solving problems with such languages. Particular attention is paid to the expressiveness of the languages for formalising planning problems with temporal constraints, both mono-agent and multi-agent constraints, with both centralised and distributed knowledge, and as to the consequences of design choices on the complexity of the solving algorithms. Expressiveness and complexity of the main planning approaches (action-based planning and timeline-based planning) are researched and compared, also by means of temporal logics. Finally, parallel implementations of the solutions achieved thanks to those languages are studied, by using both traditional architectures and GPU-based ones, and by exploiting techniques combining research algorithms and tableau systems, constraint programming and local research.

The group's members are permanent components of the programme committees of the main international conventions concerning AI, Knowledge Representation, Temporal Representation and Reasoning, Temporal Logic, and Constraint Programming, such as, for instance, IJCAI, AAAI, KR, ECAI, JELIA, CP, ICLP, LPNMR and TIME, as well as of the national conventions of said areas.

The group has several national and international collaborations, in particular with the New Mexico State University, the University of Western Australia and with the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council (CNR), and it coordinated several research projects concerning these topics, including PRIN, FIRB and INDAM projects, and projects carried out in collaboration with industries.