TALplanner in IPC-2002: Extensions and Control Rules

TL;DR

TALplanner, a forward-chaining planner using temporal logic for pruning, was extended and tested in the IPC-2002 to handle increased domain complexity and expressivity.

Contribution

This paper details the extensions and control rules added to TALplanner to improve its performance and expressivity for the IPC-2002 competition domains.

Findings

TALplanner successfully participated in IPC-2002 with extended capabilities.

The planner's domain knowledge was adapted for complex benchmark domains.

Extensions improved TALplanner's ability to handle increased expressivity.

Abstract

TALplanner is a forward-chaining planner that relies on domain knowledge in the shape of temporal logic formulas in order to prune irrelevant parts of the search space. TALplanner recently participated in the third International Planning Competition, which had a clear emphasis on increasing the complexity of the problem domains being used as benchmark tests and the expressivity required to represent these domains in a planning system. Like many other planners, TALplanner had support for some but not all aspects of this increase in expressivity, and a number of changes to the planner were required. After a short introduction to TALplanner, this article describes some of the changes that were made before and during the competition. We also describe the process of introducing suitable domain knowledge for several of the competition domains.