State Space Planning Using Transaction Logic
Michael Kifer
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Abstract
State space planning algorithms have been considered as one of the main classical planning techniques to solve classical planning problems since 1960. In this paper, we show that Transaction Logic is an appropriate language and framework to study and compare these planning algorithms, which enables one to have more efficient planners in logic programming frameworks. Specifically, we take STRIPS planning and forward state space planning algorithms, and show that the specification of these algorithms in Transaction Logic lets one implement complicated planning algorithms in declarative programming languages (e.g. Prolog). We first provide a formal representation of these planning algorithms in Transaction Logic, which can be used to automatically translate STRIPS planning problems in PDDL to Transaction Logic rules. Then, we use the resulting Transaction Logic rules to solve planning problems and compare the performance of those algorithms in our simple interpreter implemented in XSB Prolog. We use several case studies to show how the linear STRIPS planning algorithm is faster than forward state space search. Our experiments highlight the fact that a planner implemented by logic programming framework can become faster if an appropriate planning algorithm is applied.
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