The Epistemic Planning Domain Definition Language: Official Guideline

2026-01-28

AI Summary

Existing cognitive planning systems suffer from a lack of standardized problem description languages, hindering systematic comparison and reuse. To address this limitation, this work proposes EPDDL—a PDDL-inspired domain definition language that rigorously supports the semantics of Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) for unified modeling of multi-agent epistemic planning tasks. EPDDL formalizes epistemic actions through abstract event models and establishes syntax and semantics aligned with DEL, while also identifying a practical subset amenable to existing planners. The expressiveness and utility of EPDDL are demonstrated through successful encodings of representative benchmark problems, confirming its effectiveness in enhancing interoperability, enabling reproducible evaluation, and advancing research in cognitive planning.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Multiagent Planning
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Description Logics
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systems
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Foundation models and LLMs for Web-related graphs

Abstract

Epistemic planning extends (multi-agent) automated planning by making agents'knowledge and beliefs first-class aspects of the planning formalism. One of the most well-known frameworks for epistemic planning is Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL), which offers an rich and natural semantics for modelling problems in this setting. The high expressive power provided by DEL make DEL-based epistemic planning a challenging problem to tackle both theoretically, and in practical implementations. As a result, existing epistemic planners often target different DEL fragments, and typically rely on ad hoc languages to represent benchmarks, and sometimes no language at all. This fragmentation hampers comparison, reuse, and systematic benchmark development. We address these issues by introducing the Epistemic Planning Domain Definition Language (EPDDL). EPDDL provides a unique PDDL-like representation that captures the entire DEL semantics, enabling uniform specification of epistemic planning tasks. Our main contributions are: 1. A formal development of abstract event models, a novel representation for epistemic actions used to define the semantics of our language; 2. A formal specification of EPDDL's syntax and semantics grounded in DEL with abstract event models. Through examples of representative benchmarks, we illustrate how EPDDL facilitates interoperability, reproducible evaluation, and future advances in epistemic planning.

Problem

• epistemic planning
• Dynamic Epistemic Logic
• planning language
• benchmarking
• interoperability

Innovation

• Epistemic Planning
• Dynamic Epistemic Logic
• EPDDL
• Abstract Event Models
• PDDL-like Language