Planning as tabled logic programming. Issue 4 (3rd September 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: ZHOU, NENG-FA; BARTÁK, ROMAN; DOVIER, AGOSTINO
• Editors: Eiter, Thomas; Toni, Francesca
• Is Part Of: Theory and practice of logic programming. Volume 15:Issue 4/5(2015)
• Page Start: 543
• Page End: 558
• Publication Date: 2015-09-03
• Subjects: Logic programming -- Periodicals; Artificial intelligence -- Computer programs -- Periodicals; Constraint programming (Computer science) -- Periodicals; 005.115
• DOI: 10.1017/S1471068415000216
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1471-0684

Abstract

Abstract: This paper describes Picat's planner, its implementation, and planning models for several domains used in International Planning Competition (IPC) 2014. Picat's planner is implemented by use of tabling. During search, every state encountered is tabled, and tabled states are used to effectively perform resource-bounded search. In Picat, structured data can be used to avoid enumerating all possible permutations of objects, and term sharing is used to avoid duplication of common state data. This paper presents several modeling techniques through the example models, ranging from designing state representations to facilitate data sharing and symmetry breaking, encoding actions with operations for efficient precondition checking and state updating, to incorporating domain knowledge and heuristics. Broadly, this paper demonstrates the effectiveness of tabled logic programming for planning, and argues the importance of modeling despite recent significant progress in domain-independent PDDL planners.