Planning Task Shielding: Detecting and Repairing Flaws in Planning Tasks through Turning them Unsolvable

TL;DR

This paper introduces planning task shielding, an approach to detect and repair flaws in planning tasks by minimally modifying actions to prevent flawed states, ensuring tasks become unsolvable.

Contribution

The paper presents allmin, an optimal algorithm for minimally modifying planning tasks to shield systems by making them unsolvable.

Findings

allmin effectively shields planning tasks of increasing size

allmin minimally modifies actions to prevent flawed states

the approach ensures tasks are rendered unsolvable to avoid flaws

Abstract

Most research in planning focuses on generating a plan to achieve a desired set of goals. However, a goal specification can also be used to encode a property that should never hold, allowing a planner to identify a trace that would reach a flawed state. In such cases, the objective may shift to modifying the planning task to ensure that the flawed state is never reached-in other words, to make the planning task unsolvable. In this paper we introduce planning task shielding: the problem of detecting and repairing flaws in planning tasks. We propose $allmin$, an optimal algorithm that solves these tasks by minimally modifying the original actions to render the planning task unsolvable. We empirically evaluate the performance of $allmin$ in shielding planning tasks of increasing size, showing how it can effectively shield the system by turning the planning task unsolvable.