Planning by Rewriting

TL;DR

Planning by Rewriting (PbR) is a new domain-independent planning paradigm that uses plan-rewriting rules and local search to efficiently generate high-quality plans from initial suboptimal ones.

Contribution

Introduces a novel planning framework that combines declarative plan rewriting with local search, improving efficiency and plan quality in domain-independent planning.

Findings

PbR achieves significant savings in planning effort.

PbR generates high-quality plans efficiently.

Experimental results validate the effectiveness of PbR.

Abstract

Domain-independent planning is a hard combinatorial problem. Taking into account plan quality makes the task even more difficult. This article introduces Planning by Rewriting (PbR), a new paradigm for efficient high-quality domain-independent planning. PbR exploits declarative plan-rewriting rules and efficient local search techniques to transform an easy-to-generate, but possibly suboptimal, initial plan into a high-quality plan. In addition to addressing the issues of planning efficiency and plan quality, this framework offers a new anytime planning algorithm. We have implemented this planner and applied it to several existing domains. The experimental results show that the PbR approach provides significant savings in planning effort while generating high-quality plans.