On the expressive power of planning formalisms

  • Authors:
  • Bernhard Nebel

  • Affiliations:
  • Albert-Ludwigs-Univ., Freiburg, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Logic-based artificial intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

The notion of "expressive Power" is often used in the literature on Planning. However, it is usually only used in an informal way. In this paper, we will formalize this notion using the "compilability framework" and analyze the expressive power of some variants of STRIPS allowing for conditional effects and arbitrary Boolean formulae in preconditions. One interesting consequence of this analysis is that we are able to confirm a conjecture by Backstrom that preconditions in conjunctive normal form add to the expressive power of propositional STRIPS. Further, we will show that STRIPS with conditional effects is incomparable to STRIPS with Boolean formulae as preconditions. Finally, we show that preconditions in conjunctive normal form do not add any expressive power once we have conditional effects.