An Experimental Comparison of Classical, FOND and Probabilistic Planning

Domain-independent planning in general is broadly applicable to a wide range of tasks. Many formalisms exist that allow the description of different aspects of realistic problems. Which one to use is often no obvious choice, since a higher degree of expressiveness usually comes with an increased planning time and/or a decreased policy quality. Under the assumption that hard guarantees are not required, users are faced with a decision between multiple approaches. As a generic model we use a probabilistic description in the form of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We define abstracting translations into a classical planning formalism and fully observable nondeterministic planning. Our goal is to give insight into how state-of-the-art systems perform on different MDP planning domains.