Understanding Planning Tasks: Domain Complexity and Heuristic Decomposition

by Malte Helmert

Overview

Action planning has always played a central role in Artificial Intelligence. Given a description of the current situation, a description of possible actions and a description of the goals to be achieved, the task is to identify a sequence of actions, i.e., a plan that transforms the current situation into one that satisfies the goal description.

This monograph is a revised version of Malte Helmert's doctoral thesis, Solving Planning Tasks in Theory and Practice, written under the supervision of Professor Bernhard Nebel as thesis advisor at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany, in 2006. The book contains an exhaustive analysis of the computational complexity of the benchmark problems that have been used in the past decade, namely the standard benchmark domains of the International Planning Competitions (IPC). At the same time, it contributes to the practice of solving planning tasks by presenting a powerful new approach to heuristic planning. The author also provides an in-depth analysis of so-called routing and transportation problems.

All in all, this book will contribute significantly to advancing the state of the art in automatic planning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783540777229
Publisher:	Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Publication date:	03/11/2008
Series:	Lecture Notes in Computer Science , #4929
Edition description:	2008
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.03(d)

Table of Contents

Planning Benchmarks.- The Role of Benchmarks.- Defining Planning Domains.- The Benchmark Suite.- Transportation and Route Planning.- IPC Domains: Transportation and Route Planning.- IPC Domains: Others.- Conclusions.- Fast Downward.- Solving Planning Tasks Hierarchically.- Translation.- Knowledge Compilation.- Search.- Experiments.- Discussion.