A Proof System for Unsolvable Planning Tasks

While traditionally classical planning concentrated on finding plans for solvable tasks, detecting unsolvable instances has recently attracted increasing interest. To preclude wrong results, it is desirable that the planning system provides a certificate of unsolvability that can be independently verified. We propose a rule-based proof system for unsolvability where a proof establishes a knowledge base of verifiable basic statements and applies a set of derivation rules to infer the unsolvability of the task from these statements. We argue that this approach is more flexible than a recent proposal of inductive certificates of unsolvability and show how our proof system can be used for a wide range of planning techniques.