Correcting Hierarchical Plans by Action Deletion

Hierarchical task network (HTN) planning is a model-based approach to planning. The HTN domain model consists of tasks and methods to decompose them into subtasks until obtaining primitive tasks (actions). There are recent methods for verifying if a given action sequence is a valid HTN plan. However, if the plan is invalid, all existing verification methods only say so without explaining why the plan is invalid. In the paper, we propose a method that corrects a given action sequence to form a valid HTN plan by deleting the minimal number of actions. This plan correction explains what is wrong with a given action sequence concerning the HTN domain model.

HTN Learning via Transfer Learning of Domain Landmarks

Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning uses task-subtask relationships to break complex problems into more manageable subtasks, similar to how human problem-solvers plan. However, one limitation of HTN planning is that it requires domain knowledge in the form of planning methods to perform this task decomposition. Recent work has partially alleviated this knowledge engineering requirement by learning HTN methods from traces of observed behavior. Although this greatly reduces the amount of knowledge that must be encoded by a domain expert, it requires a large collection of traces in order to infer important landmark states that are used during trace segmentation and method learning. In this paper we present a novel method for landmark inference that transfers knowledge of landmarks from previously encountered environments to new environments without requiring any traces from the new environment. We evaluate our work in a logistics planning domain and show that our approach performs comparably to the existing landmark inference method but requires far fewer traces.

Lilotane: A Lifted SAT-based Approach to Hierarchical Planning

One of the oldest and most popular approaches to automated planning is to encode the problem at hand into a propositional formula and use a Satisfiability (SAT) solver to find a solution. In all established SAT-based approaches for Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning, grounding the problem is necessary and oftentimes introduces a combinatorial blowup in terms of the number of actions and reductions to encode. Our contribution named Lilotane (Lifted Logic for Task Networks) eliminates this issue for Totally Ordered HTN planning by directly encoding the lifted representation of the problem at hand. We lazily instantiate the problem hierarchy layer by layer and use a novel SAT encoding which allows us to defer decisions regarding method arguments to the stage of SAT solving. We show the correctness of our encoding and compare it to the best performing prior SAT encoding in a worst-case analysis. Empirical evaluations confirm that Lilotane outperforms established SAT-based approaches, often by orders of magnitude, produces much smaller formulae on average, and compares favorably to other state-of-the-art HTN planners regarding robustness and plan quality. In the International Planning Competition (IPC) 2020, a preliminary version of Lilotane scored the second place. We expect these considerable improvements to SAT-based HTN planning to open up new perspectives for SAT-based approaches in related problem classes.

Delete- and Ordering-Relaxation Heuristics for HTN Planning

In HTN planning, the hierarchy has a wide impact on solutions. First, there is (usually) no state-based goal given, the objective is given via the hierarchy. Second, it enforces actions to be in a plan. Third, planners are not allowed to add actions apart from those introduced via decomposition, i.e. via the hierarchy. However, no heuristic considers the interplay of hierarchy and actions in the plan exactly (without relaxation) because this makes heuristic calculation NP-hard even under delete relaxation. We introduce the problem class of delete- and ordering-free HTN planning as basis for novel HTN heuristics and show that its plan existence problem is still NP-complete. We then introduce heuristics based on the new class using an integer programming model to solve it.

HTN Planning as Heuristic Progression Search

The majority of search-based HTN planning systems can be divided into those searching a space of partial plans (a plan space) and those performing progression search, i.e., that build the solution in a forward manner. So far, all HTN planners that guide the search by using heuristic functions are based on plan space search. Those systems represent the set of search nodes more effectively by maintaining a partial ordering between tasks, but they have only limited information about the current state during search. In this article, we propose the use of progression search as basis for heuristic HTN planning systems. Such systems can calculate their heuristics incorporating the current state, because it is tracked during search. Our contribution is the following: We introduce two novel progression algorithms that avoid unnecessary branching when the problem at hand is partially ordered and show that both are sound and complete. We show that defining systematicity is problematic for search in HTN planning, propose a definition, and show that it is fulfilled by one of our algorithms. Then, we introduce a method to apply arbitrary classical planning heuristics to guide the search in HTN planning. It relaxes the HTN planning model to a classical model that is only used for calculating heuristics. It is updated during search and used to create heuristic values that are used to guide the HTN search. We show that it can be used to create HTN heuristics with interesting theoretical properties like safety, goal-awareness, and admissibility. Our empirical evaluation shows that the resulting system outperforms the state of the art in search-based HTN planning.

Semantic Attachments for HTN Planning

Hierarchical Task Networks (HTN) planning uses a decomposition process guided by domain knowledge to guide search towards a planning task. While many HTN planners allow calls to external processes (e.g. to a simulator interface) during the decomposition process, this is a computationally expensive process, so planner implementations often use such calls in an ad-hoc way using very specialized domain knowledge to limit the number of calls. Conversely, the classical planners that are capable of using external calls (often called semantic attachments) during planning are limited to generating a fixed number of ground operators at problem grounding time. We formalize Semantic Attachments for HTN planning using semi coroutines, allowing such procedurally defined predicates to link the planning process to custom unifications outside of the planner, such as numerical results from a robotics simulator. The resulting planner then uses such coroutines as part of its backtracking mechanism to search through parallel dimensions of the state-space (e.g. through numeric variables). We show empirically that our planner outperforms the state-of-the-art numeric planners in a number of domains using minimal extra domain knowledge.

On Succinct Groundings of HTN Planning Problems

Both search-based and translation-based planning systems usually operate on grounded representations of the problem. Planning models, however, are commonly defined using lifted description languages. Thus, planning systems usually generate a grounded representation of the lifted model as a preprocessing step. For HTN planning models, only one method to ground lifted models has been published so far. In this paper we present a new approach for grounding HTN planning problems that produces smaller groundings in a shorter timespan than the previously published method.

Refining HTN Methods via Task Insertion with Preferences

Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning is showing its power in real-world planning. Although domain experts have partial hierarchical domain knowledge, it is time-consuming to specify all HTN methods, leaving them incomplete. On the other hand, traditional HTN learning approaches focus only on declarative goals, omitting the hierarchical domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel learning framework to refine HTN methods via task insertion with completely preserving the original methods. As it is difficult to identify incomplete methods without designating declarative goals for compound tasks, we introduce the notion of prioritized preference to capture the incompleteness possibility of methods. Specifically, the framework first computes the preferred completion profile w.r.t. the prioritized preference to refine the incomplete methods. Then it finds the minimal set of refined methods via a method substitution operation. Experimental analysis demonstrates that our approach is effective, especially in solving new HTN planning instances.