PRP Rebooted: Advancing the State of the Art in FOND Planning

TL;DR

This paper introduces PR2, a new FOND planner that significantly outperforms existing methods across a broad set of benchmark domains by leveraging novel heuristics and techniques.

Contribution

The paper presents PR2, a state-of-the-art FOND planner with innovative heuristics that advances the performance and effectiveness of FOND planning methods.

Findings

PR2 outperforms four leading FOND planners in 17 of 18 benchmark domains.

The novel FOND-aware heuristic significantly improves planning efficiency.

Ablation studies confirm the impact of the introduced techniques.

Abstract

Fully Observable Non-Deterministic (FOND) planning is a variant of classical symbolic planning in which actions are nondeterministic, with an action's outcome known only upon execution. It is a popular planning paradigm with applications ranging from robot planning to dialogue-agent design and reactive synthesis. Over the last 20 years, a number of approaches to FOND planning have emerged. In this work, we establish a new state of the art, following in the footsteps of some of the most powerful FOND planners to date. Our planner, PR2, decisively outperforms the four leading FOND planners, at times by a large margin, in 17 of 18 domains that represent a comprehensive benchmark suite. Ablation studies demonstrate the impact of various techniques we introduce, with the largest improvement coming from our novel FOND-aware heuristic.