VHPOP: Versatile Heuristic Partial Order Planner

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of artificial intelligence research Vol. 20; pp. 405 - 430
Main Authors: Younes, H. L.S., Simmons, R. G.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: San Francisco AI Access Foundation 01-01-2003
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1076-9757
1076-9757
1943-5037
DOI:10.1613/jair.1136