plasp 3: Towards Effective ASP Planning

TL;DR

The paper introduces Plasp 3, an enhanced ASP planning tool that broadens feature support, introduces novel encodings, and leverages advanced ASP solving techniques to improve planning performance.

Contribution

It presents a new version of Plasp with expanded feature support, innovative encodings, and advanced algorithms for ASP-based planning, enabling comprehensive analysis.

Findings

Enhanced planning performance demonstrated empirically.

New encodings improve handling of multivalued fluents.

Advanced algorithms significantly impact ASP planning efficiency.

Abstract

We describe the new version of the PDDL-to-ASP translator plasp. First, it widens the range of accepted PDDL features. Second, it contains novel planning encodings, some inspired by SAT planning and others exploiting ASP features such as well-foundedness. All of them are designed for handling multivalued fluents in order to capture both PDDL as well as SAS planning formats. Third, enabled by multishot ASP solving, it offers advanced planning algorithms also borrowed from SAT planning. As a result, plasp provides us with an ASP-based framework for studying a variety of planning techniques in a uniform setting. Finally, we demonstrate in an empirical analysis that these techniques have a significant impact on the performance of ASP planning.