Platform-Aware Mission Planning

TL;DR

This paper introduces Platform-Aware Mission Planning (PAMP), a novel approach that ensures mission plans are robust against non-deterministic platform and environment behaviors using abstraction-refinement techniques.

Contribution

It formalizes PAMP as a new planning problem with exists-forall conditions and proposes two solutions, including an abstraction-refinement loop with verification, demonstrating their soundness and completeness.

Findings

The abstraction-refinement approach outperforms the baseline.

PAMP effectively guarantees safety under non-determinism.

Heterogeneous modeling enhances planning robustness.

Abstract

Planning for autonomous systems typically requires reasoning with models at different levels of abstraction, and the harmonization of two competing sets of objectives: high-level mission goals that refer to an interaction of the system with the external environment, and low-level platform constraints that aim to preserve the integrity and the correct interaction of the subsystems. The complicated interplay between these two models makes it very hard to reason on the system as a whole, especially when the objective is to find plans with robustness guarantees, considering the non-deterministic behavior of the lower layers of the system. In this paper, we introduce the problem of Platform-Aware Mission Planning (PAMP), addressing it in the setting of temporal durative actions. The PAMP problem differs from standard temporal planning for its exists-forall nature: the high-level plan dealing with mission goals is required to satisfy safety and executability constraints, for all the possible non-deterministic executions of the low-level model of the platform and the environment. We propose two approaches for solving PAMP. The first baseline approach amalgamates the mission and platform levels, while the second is based on an abstraction-refinement loop that leverages the combination of a planner and a verification engine. We prove the soundness and completeness of the proposed approaches and validate them experimentally, demonstrating the importance of heterogeneous modeling and the superiority of the technique based on abstraction-refinement.