Deterministic planning in the fifth international planning competition: PDDL3 and experimental evaluation of the planners

The international planning competition (IPC) is an important driver for planning research. The general goals of the IPC include pushing the state of the art in planning technology by posing new scientific challenges, encouraging direct comparison of planning systems and techniques, developing and improving a common planning domain definition language, and designing new planning domains and problems for the research community. This paper focuses on the deterministic part of the fifth international planning competition (IPC5), presenting the language and benchmark domains that we developed for the competition, as well as a detailed experimental evaluation of the deterministic planners that entered IPC5, which helps to understand the state of the art in the field. We present an extension of pddl, called pddl3, allowing the user to express strong and soft constraints about the structure of the desired plans, as well as strong and soft problem goals. We discuss the expressive power of the new language focusing on the restricted version that was used in IPC5, for which we give some basic results about its compilability into pddl2. Moreover, we study the relative performance of the IPC5 planners in terms of solved problems, CPU time, and plan quality; we analyse their behaviour with respect to the winners of the previous competition; and we evaluate them in terms of their capability of dealing with soft goals and constraints, and of finding good quality plans in general. Overall, the results indicate significant progress in the field, but they also reveal that some important issues remain open and require further research, such as dealing with strong constraints and computing high quality plans in metric-time domains and domains involving soft goals or constraints.

[1]  Blai Bonet,et al.  Heuristics for Planning with Penalties and Rewards using Compiled Knowledge , 2006, KR.

[2]  Ivan Serina,et al.  An approach to efficient planning with numerical fluents and multi-criteria plan quality , 2008, Artif. Intell..

[3]  Subbarao Kambhampati,et al.  Planning with Goal Utility Dependencies , 2007, IJCAI.

[4]  S. Edelkamp,et al.  Engineering Benchmarks for Planning: the Domains Used in the Deterministic Part of IPC-4 , 2006, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[5]  Maria Fox,et al.  An Investigation into the Expressive Power of PDDL2.1 , 2004, ECAI.

[6]  Fahiem Bacchus,et al.  AIPS 2000 Planning Competition: The Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling Systems , 2001 .

[7]  Stephen Cresswell,et al.  Compilation of LTL Goal Formulas into PDDL , 2004, ECAI.

[8]  S. Edelkamp,et al.  The Deterministic Part of IPC-4: An Overview , 2005, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[9]  Craig A. Knoblock,et al.  PDDL-the planning domain definition language , 1998 .

[10]  Stefan Edelkamp,et al.  On the Compilation of Plan Constraints and Preferences , 2006, ICAPS.

[11]  Juan José Salazar González,et al.  The biobjective travelling purchaser problem , 2005, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[12]  Yixin Chen,et al.  Temporal Planning using Subgoal Partitioning and Resolution in SGPlan , 2006, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[13]  V. Rich.  Personal communication , 1989, Nature.

[14]  J. Penberthy.  Planning with continuous change , 1993 .

[15]  Malte Helmert,et al.  The Fast Downward Planning System , 2006, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[16]  David E. Smith.  Choosing Objectives in Over-Subscription Planning , 2004, ICAPS.

[17]  Patrik Haslum,et al.  Some Results on the Complexity of Planning with Incomplete Information , 1999, ECP.

[18]  Pierre Wolper,et al.  Simple on-the-fly automatic verification of linear temporal logic , 1995, PSTV.

[19]  Subbarao Kambhampati,et al.  Effective Approaches for Partial Satisfaction (Over-Subscription) Planning , 2004, AAAI.

[20]  Francesca Rossi,et al.  Controllability of Soft Temporal Constraint Problems , 2004, CP.

[21]  Enrico Giunchiglia,et al.  Planning as Satisfiability with Preferences , 2007, AAAI.

[22]  Juan José Salazar González,et al.  A heuristic approach for the Travelling Purchaser Problem , 2005, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[23]  Subbarao Kambhampati,et al.  A Hybrid Linear Programming and Relaxed Plan Heuristic for Partial Satisfaction Planning Problems , 2007, ICAPS.

[24]  Peter A. Jarvis,et al.  Efficient flexible planning via dynamic flexible constraint satisfaction , 2001 .

[25]  Subbarao Kambhampati,et al.  Partial Satisfaction (Over-Subscription) Planning as Heuristic Search , 2004 .

[26]  Bernhard Nebel,et al.  In Defense of PDDL Axioms , 2003, IJCAI.

[27]  Patrick Doherty,et al.  TALplanner: A temporal logic based forward chaining planner , 2001, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.

[28]  Bernhard Nebel,et al.  On the expressive power of planning formalisms , 2000 .

[29]  F. Wilcoxon.  SOME RAPID APPROXIMATE STATISTICAL PROCEDURES , 1950 .

[30]  Jussi Rintanen,et al.  Complexity of Concurrent Temporal Planning , 2007, ICAPS.

[31]  Enrico Pontelli,et al.  Planning with Preferences Using Logic Programming , 2004, LPNMR.

[32]  Jorge A. Baier,et al.  Planning with Temporally Extended Goals Using Heuristic Search , 2006, ICAPS.

[33]  Didier Dubois,et al.  Possibility theory in constraint satisfaction problems: Handling priority, preference and uncertainty , 1996, Applied Intelligence.

[34]  Hector Geffner,et al.  Branching and pruning: An optimal temporal POCL planner based on constraint programming , 2004, Artif. Intell..

[35]  Stephan Merz,et al.  Model Checking , 2000 .

[36]  Ronen I. Brafman,et al.  Planning with Goal Preferences and Constraints , 2005, ICAPS.

[37]  Jorge A. Baier,et al.  Planning with First-Order Temporally Extended Goals using Heuristic Search , 2006, AAAI.

[38]  Alfonso Gerevini,et al.  Preferences and soft constraints in PDDL3 , 2006 .

[39]  Stefan Voß,et al.  Applications of modern heuristic search methods to pattern sequencing problems , 1999, Comput. Oper. Res..

[40]  Jussi Rintanen,et al.  Incorporation of Temporal Logic Control into Plan Operators , 2000, ECAI.

[41]  M. Fox,et al.  The 3rd International Planning Competition: Results and Analysis , 2003, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[42]  Patrik Haslum.  Quality of solutions to IPC5 benchmark problems: Preliminary results , 2007 .

[43]  Blai Bonet,et al.  The AIPS-98 Planning Competition , 2000, AI Mag..

[44]  Francesca Rossi,et al.  Semiring-based constraint solving and optimization , 1997 .

[45]  Avrim Blum,et al.  Fast Planning Through Planning Graph Analysis , 1995, IJCAI.

[46]  Blai Bonet,et al.  Planning as heuristic search , 2001, Artif. Intell..

[47]  Henning Mankell,et al.  [One step behind]. , 1965, Tidskrift for Sveriges sjukskoterskor.

[48]  Derek Long,et al.  Plan Constraints and Preferences in PDDL3 , 2006 .

[49]  G. G. Stokes.  "J." , 1890, The New Yale Book of Quotations.

[50]  Christer Bäckström,et al.  Expressive Equivalence of Planning Formalisms , 1995, Artif. Intell..

[51]  Hans Tompits,et al.  A General Framework for Expressing Preferences in Causal Reasoning and Planning , 2007, J. Log. Comput..

[52]  Paul Thagard,et al.  Pathways to Biomedical Discovery , 2003, Philosophy of Science.

[53]  Fahiem Bacchus,et al.  Using temporal logics to express search control knowledge for planning , 2000, Artif. Intell..

[54]  Maria Fox,et al.  PDDL2.1: An Extension to PDDL for Expressing Temporal Planning Domains , 2003, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[55]  Bernhard Nebel,et al.  The FF Planning System: Fast Plan Generation Through Heuristic Search , 2011, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[56]  K. Kohn.  Molecular interaction map of the mammalian cell cycle control and DNA repair systems. , 1999, Molecular biology of the cell.

[57]  Francesca Rossi,et al.  Semiring-based constraint satisfaction and optimization , 1997, JACM.

[58]  Sylvie Thiébaux,et al.  Search Control in Planning for Temporally Extended Goals , 2005, ICAPS.

[59]  Fahiem Bacchus,et al.  The AIPS '00 Planning Competition , 2001, AI Mag..

[60]  Fred Kröger,et al.  Temporal Logic of Programs , 1987, EATCS Monographs on Theoretical Computer Science.

[61]  Fahiem Bacchus,et al.  Planning for temporally extended goals , 1996, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.

[62]  Zohar Manna,et al.  The Temporal Logic of Reactive and Concurrent Systems , 1991, Springer New York.

[63]  Horacio Hideki Yanasse,et al.  Connections between cutting-pattern sequencing, VLSI design, and flexible machines , 2002, Comput. Oper. Res..