Hierarchical Planning in the IPC
This work tackles the problem of fragmented research and incomparable planners in hierarchical planning, which is incremental as it builds on existing competition frameworks.
The paper addresses the lack of standardization in hierarchical planning by proposing a new competition track in the IPC, aiming to establish a common description language, benchmark problems, and fair comparison methods for HTN planners.
Over the last year, the amount of research in hierarchical planning has increased, leading to significant improvements in the performance of planners. However, the research is diverging and planners are somewhat hard to compare against each other. This is mostly caused by the fact that there is no standard set of benchmark domains, nor even a common description language for hierarchical planning problems. As a consequence, the available planners support a widely varying set of features and (almost) none of them can solve (or even parse) any problem developed for another planner. With this paper, we propose to create a new track for the IPC in which hierarchical planners will compete. This competition will result in a standardised description language, broader support for core features of that language among planners, a set of benchmark problems, a means to fairly and objectively compare HTN planners, and for new challenges for planners.