In defense of PDDL axioms

  • Authors:

  • Sylvie Thiebaux;Jorg Hoffmann;Bernhard Nebel

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Sciences Laboratory, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia;Institut fur Informatik, Universitat Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany;Institut fur Informatik, Universitat Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'03 Proceedings of the 18th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

There is controversy as to whether explicit support for PDDL-like axioms and derived predicates is needed for planners to handle real-world domains effectively. Many researchers have deplored the lack of precise semantics for such axioms, while others have argued that it might be best to compile them away. We propose an adequate semantics for PDDL axioms and show that they are an essential feature by proving that it is impossible to compile them away if we restrict the growth of plans and domain descriptions to be polynomial. These results suggest that adding a reasonable implementation to handle axioms inside the planner is beneficial for the performance. Our experiments confirm this suggestion.