Hybrid Planning - Theoretical Foundations and Practical Applications

The thesis presents a novel set-theoretic formalization of (propositional) hybrid planning – a planning framework that fuses Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning with Partial-Order Causal-Link (POCL) planning. Several sub classes thereof are identified that capture well-known problems such as HTN planning and POCL planning. For these problem classes, the complexity of the plan-existence problem is investigated, i.e., the problem of deciding whether there exists a solution for a given planning problem. For solving the problems of the respective problem classes, a hybrid planning algorithm is presented. Its search is guided by informed heuristics. Several such heuristics are introduced, both for POCL planning problems (i.e., problems without task hierarchy) and for hybrid planning problems (i.e., heuristics that are “hierarchy-aware”).