Handling of Inertia in a Planning System
Jana Koehler, Jöerg Hoffmann · 1999
The generation of the set of all ground actions for a given set of ADL operators, which are allowed to have conditional effects and preconditions that can be represented using arbitrary first-order formulas is a complex process which heavily influences the performance of any planner or preplanning analysis method. The paper describes a sophisticated instantiation procedure that determines so-called inertia in a given problem representation and uses them to perform simplifications of formulas during the instantiation process. As a result, many inapplicable actions are detected and ruled out from the domain representation yielding a much smaller search space for the planner. May 1 Introduction A planning system that handles a more expressive language than STRIPS requires sophisticated algorithmic solutions to quite a number of problems, which have nothing to do with the actual search process for a plan. One of these problems concerns the computation of the set of actions as all ground...