Answer Set Planning: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews two and a half decades of answer set planning, highlighting foundational concepts, recent advancements, applications, and future research challenges in using ASP for planning problems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of answer set planning's development, covering theoretical foundations, practical applications, and identifying key challenges for future work.

Findings

Answer set planning has evolved significantly over 25 years.

ASP-based planning systems are effective in complex domains.

Several challenges remain for scalability and real-world application.

Abstract

Answer Set Planning refers to the use of Answer Set Programming (ASP) to compute plans, i.e., solutions to planning problems, that transform a given state of the world to another state. The development of efficient and scalable answer set solvers has provided a significant boost to the development of ASP-based planning systems. This paper surveys the progress made during the last two and a half decades in the area of answer set planning, from its foundations to its use in challenging planning domains. The survey explores the advantages and disadvantages of answer set planning. It also discusses typical applications of answer set planning and presents a set of challenges for future research.