MIPS: The Model-Checking Integrated Planning System

Mips is a planning system that applies binary decision diagrams (BDDs) to compactly represent world states in a planning problem and efficiently explore the underlying state space. It was the first general planning system based on model-checking methods. It can handle the strips subset of the pddl language and some additional features from adl, namely, negative preconditions and (universal) conditional effects. At the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS'00), mips was one of five planning systems to be awarded for distinguished performance in the fully automated track. This article gives a brief introduction to, and explains the basic planning algorithm used by, mips, using a simple logistics problem as an example.