Compiling Temporal Numeric Planning into Discrete PDDL+: Extended Version
This work addresses a long-standing gap in automated planning for researchers and practitioners by providing a practical solution for temporal numeric planning, though it is incremental as it builds on known theoretical possibilities.
The authors tackled the problem of compiling temporal planning with durative actions into PDDL+ by presenting a practical polynomial compilation that fully captures semantics and assumes non-self-overlapping actions, resulting in retained plan length up to a constant factor and experimental relevance for hard temporal numeric problems.
Since the introduction of the PDDL+ modeling language, it was known that temporal planning with durative actions (as in PDDL 2.1) could be compiled into PDDL+. However, no practical compilation was presented in the literature ever since. We present a practical compilation from temporal planning with durative actions into PDDL+, fully capturing the semantics and only assuming the non-self-overlapping of actions. Our compilation is polynomial, retains the plan length up to a constant factor and is experimentally shown to be of practical relevance for hard temporal numeric problems.