An Efficient HTN to STRIPS Encoding for Concurrent Plans

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new encoding method converting HTN planning problems into STRIPS problems that supports concurrent plans, outperforming previous methods on benchmark tests.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel HTN to STRIPS encoding that enables concurrent planning and demonstrates improved performance over existing approaches.

Findings

Outperforms previous encodings on hierarchical IPC benchmarks

Supports concurrent plans in STRIPS encoding

Enhances efficiency of hierarchical planning solutions

Abstract

The Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) formalism is used to express a wide variety of planning problems in terms of decompositions of tasks into subtaks. Many techniques have been proposed to solve such hierarchical planning problems. A particular technique is to encode hierarchical planning problems as classical STRIPS planning problems. One advantage of this technique is to benefit directly from the constant improvements made by STRIPS planners. However, there are still few effective and expressive encodings. In this paper, we present a new HTN to STRIPS encoding allowing to generate concurrent plans. We show experimentally that this encoding outperforms previous approaches on hierarchical IPC benchmarks.