Compiling Temporal Numeric Planning into Discrete PDDL+: Extended Version

TL;DR

This paper presents a practical polynomial compilation method that translates temporal planning with durative actions into PDDL+, accurately capturing semantics and demonstrating effectiveness on complex numeric problems.

Contribution

It introduces the first practical, semantics-preserving compilation from temporal durative actions to PDDL+ with polynomial complexity.

Findings

Compilation is polynomial in size

Retains plan length within a constant factor

Effective on challenging temporal numeric problems

Abstract

Since the introduction of the PDDL+ modeling language, it was known that temporal planning with durative actions (as in PDDL 2.1) could be compiled into PDDL+. However, no practical compilation was presented in the literature ever since. We present a practical compilation from temporal planning with durative actions into PDDL+, fully capturing the semantics and only assuming the non-self-overlapping of actions. Our compilation is polynomial, retains the plan length up to a constant factor and is experimentally shown to be of practical relevance for hard temporal numeric problems.