The Deterministic Part of IPC-4: An Overview

TL;DR

This paper reviews the organization, results, and advancements of the deterministic segment of IPC-4, highlighting system performance, competition structure, and the extended planning language PDDL2.2.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of IPC-4's deterministic planning competition, including new language features and detailed analysis of system performances.

Findings

Increased number of competing systems compared to previous IPCs

Introduction of PDDL2.2 with derived predicates and timed initial literals

Detailed summary of competition results and prize allocation

Abstract

We provide an overview of the organization and results of the deterministic part of the 4th International Planning Competition, i.e., of the part concerned with evaluating systems doing deterministic planning. IPC-4 attracted even more competing systems than its already large predecessors, and the competition event was revised in several important respects. After giving an introduction to the IPC, we briefly explain the main differences between the deterministic part of IPC-4 and its predecessors. We then introduce formally the language used, called PDDL2.2 that extends PDDL2.1 by derived predicates and timed initial literals. We list the competing systems and overview the results of the competition. The entire set of data is far too large to be presented in full. We provide a detailed summary; the complete data is available in an online appendix. We explain how we awarded the competition prizes.