Symbolic Pattern Temporal Numeric Planning with Intermediate Conditions and Effects
🤖 AI Summary
This work proposes the first extension of Symbolic Pattern Planning (SPP) that supports overlapping action execution and condition/effect triggering at arbitrary time points for temporal numeric planning problems with Intermediate Conditions and Effects (ICEs). By encoding symbolic action patterns via SMT and integrating an iterative mechanism to refine causal orderings, the approach fully captures the complex interactions between ICEs and temporal actions while preserving completeness. The resulting planner, Patty, outperforms existing systems on standard benchmarks without ICEs and matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art search-based planners on domains with ICEs, demonstrating particularly strong advantages in real-world application scenarios.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Recently, a Symbolic Pattern Planning (SPP) approach was proposed for numeric planning where a pattern (i.e., a finite sequence of actions) suggests a causal order between actions. The pattern is then encoded in a SMT formula whose models correspond to valid plans. If the suggestion by the pattern is inaccurate and no valid plan can be found, the pattern is extended until it contains the causal order of actions in a valid plan, making the approach complete. In this paper, we extend the SPP approach to the temporal planning with Intermediate Conditions and Effects (ICEs) fragment, where $(i)$ actions are durative (and thus can overlap over time) and have conditions/effects which can be checked/applied at any time during an action's execution, and $(ii)$ one can specify plan's conditions/effects that must be checked/applied at specific times during the plan execution. Experimental results show that our SPP planner Patty $(i)$ outperforms all other planners in the literature in the majority of temporal domains without ICEs, $(ii)$ obtains comparable results with the SoTA search planner for ICS in literature domains with ICEs, and $(iii)$ outperforms the same planner in a novel domain based on a real-world application.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Temporal Planning
Intermediate Conditions and Effects
Symbolic Pattern Planning
Numeric Planning
Durative Actions
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Symbolic Pattern Planning
Temporal Planning
Intermediate Conditions and Effects
SMT Encoding
Durative Actions
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