A Survey on Hierarchical Planning – One Abstract Idea, Many Concrete Realizations

A Survey on Hierarchical Planning – One Abstract Idea, Many Concrete Realizations

Pascal Bercher, Ron Alford, Daniel Höller

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Survey track. Pages 6267-6275. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/875

Hierarchical planning has attracted renewed interest in the last couple of years, which led to numerous novel formalisms, problem classes, and theoretical investigations. Yet it is important to differentiate between the various formalisms and problem classes, since they show -- sometimes fundamental -- differences with regard to their expressivity and computational complexity: Some of them can be regarded equivalent to non-hierarchical formalisms while others are clearly more expressive. We survey the most important hierarchical problem classes and explain their differences and similarities. We furthermore give pointers to some of the best-known planning systems capable of solving the respective problem classes.
Keywords:
Planning and Scheduling: Hierarchical planning
Planning and Scheduling: Theoretical Foundations of Planning
Planning and Scheduling: Search in Planning and Scheduling
Planning and Scheduling: Planning Algorithms