Symbolic Numeric Planning with Patterns

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for solving linear numeric planning problems, called Symbolic Pattern Planning. Given a planning problem Pi, a bound n and a pattern --defined as an arbitrary sequence of actions-- we encode the problem of finding a plan for Pi with bound n as a formula with fewer variables and/or clauses than the state-of-the-art rolled-up and relaxed-relaxed-exists encodings. More importantly, we prove that for any given bound, it is never the case that the latter two encodings allow finding a valid plan while ours does not. On the experimental side, we consider 6 other planning systems --including the ones which participated in this year's International Planning Competition (IPC)-- and we show that our planner Patty has remarkably good comparative performances on this year's IPC problems.

Authors

• Matteo Cardellini Università degli Studi di Genova
• Enrico Giunchiglia Università degli Studi di Genova
• Marco Maratea DeMaCS, Universit`a della Calabria, Italy

Keywords

• CSO: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• PRS: Deterministic Planning
• PRS: Model-Based Reasoning