Planning with Incomplete Information in Quantified Answer Set Programming
This work addresses planning under uncertainty for AI systems, but it is incremental as it applies an existing QASP method to planning domains.
The paper tackles planning with incomplete information by using Quantified Answer Set Programming (QASP) to represent and solve conformant and conditional planning problems, and it experimentally evaluates the approach on benchmarks with a translation-based solver.
We present a general approach to planning with incomplete information in Answer Set Programming (ASP). More precisely, we consider the problems of conformant and conditional planning with sensing actions and assumptions. We represent planning problems using a simple formalism where logic programs describe the transition function between states, the initial states and the goal states. For solving planning problems, we use Quantified Answer Set Programming (QASP), an extension of ASP with existential and universal quantifiers over atoms that is analogous to Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs). We define the language of quantified logic programs and use it to represent the solutions to different variants of conformant and conditional planning. On the practical side, we present a translation-based QASP solver that converts quantified logic programs into QBFs and then executes a QBF solver, and we evaluate experimentally the approach on conformant and conditional planning benchmarks. Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.