NASA Project for Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory

NASA Ames Research Project

KSL is conducting research for NASA Ames Research Center on monitoring and diagnosing discrete and hybrid dynamical systems, on model-based programming these systems, and on extending search and game-tree search to the control and analysis of hybrid dynamical systems. This project is co-led by Dr. Sheila McIlraith and Prof. Richard Fikes.

* * * This web page is woefully out of date. Since 2000, we have been working with NASA Ames and NASA Kennedy Space Center to develop a system for monitoring, tracking and diagnosing NASA's Reverse Water Gas Shift System (RWGS), a fuel factory that is to be sent to Mars to convert carbon dioxide from the MARS atmosphere into oxygen (with the help of some hydrogen that will be brought from Earth). The team involved in this work included: Uri Lerner, Brooks Moses, Maricia Scott, Daphne Koller and Sheila McIlraith. This web page will eventually be updated. Please contact Sheila McIlraith if you require more information in the short-term. We also direct you to the following paper. Which describes some of our earlier progress on this work. This work formed the basis or Uri Lerner's PhD thesis at Stanford. In what follows, we describe previous work on monitoring and diagnosing NASA space systems. * * *

Primary Research Team

Richard Fikes

Sheila McIlraith

Todd Neller

Satish Kumar Thittamaranahalli

NASA Ames Collaborators

Dan Clancy

Vineet Gupta (formerly)

James Kurien

Other Team Members

Edward Feigenbaum

Deborah McGuinness

Research Objectives

Monitoring, diagnosing and controlling hybrid systems

Model-based programming for discrete and hybrid dynamical systems

Extending search and game-tree search to the control and analysis of hybrid dynamical systems

Relevant Publications

Monitoring and Diagnosing Hybrid Sysetms: McIlraith, S. ``Diagnosing Hybrid Systems: A Bayesian Model Selection Approach'', Proceedings of the Eleventh International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis (DX'00), Morelia, Mexico June 2000, pp. 140--146.

McIlraith, S., Biswas, G., Clancy, D., Gupta, V. ``Hybrid Systems Diagnosis'' , Proceedings of Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control , Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag. pgs 282-295, 2000.

McIlraith, S., Biswas, G., Clancy, D., Gupta, V. ``Towards Diagnosing Hybrid Systems'', Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis (DX'99), Loch Awe, Scotland, June 1999, pp. 193-203.
Model-Based Programming of Discrete and Hybrid Systems: McIlraith, S. ``Modeling and Programming Devices and Web Agents'', Proceedings of the NASA Goddard Workshop on Formal Approaches to Agent-Based Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag. To appear, 2000.

McIlraith, S. and Scherl, R. ``What Sensing Tells Us: Towards a Formal Theory of Testing for Dynamical Systems'', Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'2000), To appear.

McIlraith, S. ``Model-Based Programming using Golog and the Situation Calculus'', Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis (DX'99), Loch Awe, Scotland, June 1999, pp. 184-192.
(Game-Tree) Search for the Analysis and Control of Hybrid Sysetms: Neller, T. "Heuristic Optimization and Dynamical System Safety Verification", in P. Antsaklis et al, eds., Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1567, Hybrid Systems V: Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Hybrid Systems (HS '97, Center for Continuing Education, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, USA, 1997), Springer Verlag, 1999.

Neller, T. "Information-Based Optimization Approaches to Dynamical System Safety Verification", in Henzinger, T.A. and Sastry, S. (eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1386, Proceedings of Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC '98), First International Workshop, Berkeley, California, USA, April 1998 , Springer Verlag, 1998.

Neller, T. "Simulation-Based Search for Hybrid System Control and Analysis", PhD Dissertation, June 2000.

Other Related Publications

Baral, C., McIlraith, S., Son, T. ``Formulating Diagnostic Problem Solving Using an Action Language with Narratives and Sensing'', Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'2000), pgs. 311-322, 2000.
McIlraith, S. ``Explanatory Diagnosis: Conjecturing Actions to Explain Observations'', Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'98), Trento, Italy, June 1998, pp. 167-177.
Deborah L. McGuinness . `` Explaining Reasoning in Description Logics'', Rutgers University Thesis, New Brunswick, 1996. Technical Report LCSR-TR-277. ( abstract ).

Presentations and Demos

Presentation of DX'00 paper on Bayesian Model Selection. Powerpoint Presentation.
COOL DEMO of the Submarine Detection Avoidance Problem: SADAT Best-First Search.