Incorporation of Temporal Logic Control into Plan Operators

Domain-specific control information is often essential in solving difficult planning problems efficiently. Temporal logics are a declarative and expressive representation for such control information. In this paper we investigate the integration of temporal logic control information into plan operators. For a given control formula and operators O, we produce a new set O of operators that works like O under the control of . We show that for a subclass of temporal logic formulae the compilation causes only a low-polynomial increase in the size of the operators, that the length of plans is not affected, and that the speed-up obtained is competitive with what is achieved with temporal logic control as formula progression. The translation uses operators with conditional effects. An important benefit of our approach is that the problem of using temporal logic formulae as control information is solved once and for all: temporal logic control can be implemented as a preprocessing step for all kinds of planning algorithms.