HTN Planning for the Composition of Stream Processing Applications

Authors

  • Shirin Sohrabi IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
  • Octavian Udrea IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
  • Anand Ranganathan IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
  • Anton Riabov IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/icaps.v23i1.13583

Keywords:

Hierarchical task network planning, Automated composition, Stream processing, Preferences, Composition patterns

Abstract

Goal-driven automated composition of software components is an important problem with applications in Web service composition and stream processing systems. The popular approach to address this problem is to build the composition automatically using AI planning. However, it is shown that some of these planning approaches may neither be feasible nor scalable for many large-scale flow-based applications. Recent advances have proven that the automated composition problem can take advantage of expert knowledge describing the many ways in which different reusable components can be composed. This knowledge can be represented using an extensible composition template or pattern. In prior work, a flow pattern language called Cascade and its corresponding specialized planner have shown the best performance in these domains. In this paper, we propose the use of Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning for the composition of stream processing applications. To this end, we propose an automated approach of creating an HTN-based problem from the Cascade representation of the flow patterns. The resulting technique not only allows us to use the HTN planning paradigm and its many advantages including added expressivity but also enables optimization and customization of composition with respect to preferences and constraints. Further, we propose and develop a lookahead heuristic and show that it significantly reduces the planning time. We have performed extensive experimentation with stream processing applications and evaluated applicability and performance of our approach.

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Published

2013-06-02

How to Cite

Sohrabi, S., Udrea, O., Ranganathan, A., & Riabov, A. (2013). HTN Planning for the Composition of Stream Processing Applications. Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, 23(1), 443-451. https://doi.org/10.1609/icaps.v23i1.13583