VHPOP: Versatile heuristic partial order planner
Abstract
VHPOP is a partial order causal link (POCL) planner loosely based on
UCPOP. It draws from the experience gained in the early to mid 1990's
on flaw selection strategies for POCL planning, and combines this with
more recent developments in the field of domain independent planning
such as distance based heuristics and reachability analysis. We
present an adaptation of the additive heuristic for plan space
planning, and modify it to account for possible reuse of existing
actions in a plan. We also propose a large set of novel flaw
selection strategies, and show how these can help us solve more
problems than previously possible by POCL planners. VHPOP also
supports planning with durative actions by incorporating standard
techniques for temporal constraint reasoning. We demonstrate that the
same heuristic techniques used to boost the performance of classical
POCL planning can be effective in domains with durative actions as
well. The result is a versatile heuristic POCL planner competitive
with established CSP-based and heuristic state space planners.
Sample citation
Håkan L. S. Younes and
Reid G. Simmons. 2003.
VHPOP: Versatile heuristic partial order planner.
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 20: 405–430.
Full paper (26 pages, 33 references)
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