Inferring State Constraints for Domain-Independent Planning

Wedescribe somenewpreprocessing techniques that enable faster domain-independentplanning. Thefirst set of techniquesis aimedat inferring state constraints from the structure of planning operators and the initial state. Ourmethods consist of generating hypothetical state constraints by inspection of operator effects and preconditions, and checking each hypothesis against all operators and the initial conditions. Anothertechniqueextracts (supersets of) predicate domainsfrom sets of ground literals obtained by Graphplan-like forward propagation from the initial state. Our various techniques are implemented in a package called DISCOPLAN.Weshow preliminary results on the effectiveness of adding computed state constraints and predicate domainsto the specification of problemsfor SAT-basedplanners such as SATPLANor MEDIC.The results suggest that large speedups in planning can be obtained by such automated methods, potentially obviating the need for adding hand-codedstate constraints.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Alfonso Gerevini, Lenhart K. Schubert
• Keywords: AAAI 1998, Hypothetical State Constraints, Initial State, Intelligent Agents, State Constraints