ECAI 2004 Conference Paper

An Investigation into the Expressive Power of PDDL2.1

Maria Fox, Derek Long, Keith Halsey

The planning domain language PDDL2.1, used in the 3rd International Planning Competition, has sparked off some controversy in the planning community as researchers consider its expressive power and the ease with which interesting domain models can be constructed in the language. In this paper we show that the expressive power of PDDL2.1 is much greater than is commonly believed. We demonstrate that PDDL2.1 can model many of the domain features often claimed to lie beyond its modelling capability. In so doing we provide a means by which powerful domain features and language constructs can be given a semantics in terms of the canonical basis of PDDL2.1.

Keywords: PDDL, expressive power, planning

Citation: Maria Fox, Derek Long, Keith Halsey: An Investigation into the Expressive Power of PDDL2.1. In R.López de Mántaras and L.Saitta (eds.): ECAI2004, Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2004, pp.328-332.

ECAI-2004 is organised by the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) and hosted by the Universitat Politècnica de València on behalf of Asociación Española de Inteligencia Artificial (AEPIA) and Associació Catalana d'Intel-ligència Artificial (ACIA).