Towards a reformulation based approach for efficient numeric planning: Numeric outer entanglements

Restricting the search space has shown to be an effective approach for improving the performance of automated planning systems. A planner-independent technique for pruning the search space is domain and problem reformulation. Recently, Outer Entanglements, which are relations between planning operators and initial or goal predicates, have been introduced as a reformulation technique for eliminating potential undesirable instances of planning operators, and thus restricting the search space. Reformulation techniques, however, have been mainly applied in classical planning, although many real-world planning applications require to deal with numerical information. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of reformulation approaches in planning with numerical fluents. In particular, we propose and extension of the notion of outer entanglements for handling numeric fluents. An empirical evaluation, which involves 150 instances from 5 domains, shows promising results.