Turning an Action Formalism into a Planner - A Case Study.

The paper describes a case study that explores the idea of building a planner with a neat semantics of the plans it produces, by choosing some action formalism that is ‘ideal’ for the planning application and building the planner accordingly. In general—and particularly so for the action formalism used in this study, which is quite expressive—this strategy is unlikely to yield fast and efficient planners if the formalism is used naïvely. Therefore, we adopt the idea that the planner approximates the theoretically ideal plans, where the approximation gets closer the more run time the planner is allowed. As the particular formalism underlying our study allows a significant degree of uncertainty to be modelled and copes with the ramification problem, we end up in a planner that is functionally comparable to modem anytime uncertainty planners, yet is based on a neat formal semantics.