Classical Planning with Avoid Conditions

Marcel Steinmetz, Joerg Hoffmann, Stefan Borgwardt, Alisa Kovtunova

Keywords: classical planning, heuristic search, state constraints

TL;DR: We explore different methods to effectively deal with avoid conditions, constraints on states that may not be part of a solution, in classical planning as heuristic search.

Abstract: It is often natural in planning to specify conditions that should be avoided, characterizing dangerous or highly undesirable behavior. PDDL3 supports this with temporal-logic state constraints. Here we focus on the simpler case where the constraint is a non-temporal formula $phi$ -- the avoid condition -- that must be false throughout the plan. We design techniques tackling such avoid conditions effectively. We show how to learn from search experience which states necessarily lead into $phi$, and we show how to tailor abstractions to recognize that avoiding $phi$ will not be possible starting from a given state. We run a large-scale experiment, comparing our techniques against compilation methods and against simple state pruning using $phi$. The results show that our techniques are often superior.