[Chair]  [Computer Science Department (FBI)]  [University Dortmund] 

Introductory Talk

Architecture

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ModPlan - Modern Action Planning


Grounding

Grounding is the process of finding (supersets of) reachable actions, facts and fluents by instantiating operators, predicates and functions with the objects that come with the problem description. Most current planners perform some form of grounding to apply planning state space exploration.

Knowledge Acquisition

One of the most efficient methods to infer a grounded representation is fact space exploration that uses a fact queue, in which the initial state is enqueued and where one fact is dequeued and processed at a time. For all operators that include this fact in the precondition list this fact is marked. If all preconditions are marked, the operator is fired, enqueuing all its add effects. Constant predicates are detected and removed and constant fluents are substituted to simplify numerical expressions. Quantification, conditional effects, domain axioms in form of derived predicates, numeric conditions and temporal operators have been integrated into this process.

Knowledge Engineering

The in- and output format of the instantiation process itself is valid PDDL, so that the grounded representation can be fed into every existing planner by the domain expert. Even though the intermediate results might become large, it is important for the expert to access the simplified state and operator descriptors to understand the working of the plan engines.

To perform the grounding process in our workbench we adapted three different technologies:

  • translate: the instantiation process that is provided with the planner Fast-Downward
  • adl2strips : the domain translation that comes with the planner FF
  • ground : the preprocessing result that is implicit in the planner MIPS.
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