Turning an action formalism into a planner

Abstract

The paper describes a case study that explores the idea of building a planner with a neat semantics of the plans it produces, by choosing some action formalism that is "ideal" for the planning application and building the planner accordingly. In general-and particularly so for the action formalism used in this study, which is quite expressive-this strategy is unlikely to yield fast and efficient planners if the formalism is used naively. Therefore, we adopt the idea that the planner approximates the theoretically ideal plans, where the approximation gets closer, the more run time the planner is allowed. As the particular formalism underlying our study allows a significant degree of uncertainty to be modeled and copes with the ramification problem, we end up in a planner that is functionally comparable to modern anytime uncertainty planners, yet is based on a neat formal semantics. To appear in the Journal of Logic and Computation, 1994. The paper is written in English.