A Knowledge-Based Approach to Planning with Incomplete Information and Sensing

In this paper we present a new approach to the problem of planning with incomplete information and sensing. Our approach is based on a higher level, “knowledge-based”, representation of the planner’s knowledge and of the domain actions. In particular, in our approach we use a set of formulas from a first-order modal logic of knowledge to represent the planner’s incomplete knowledge state. Actions are then represented as updates to this collection of formulas. Hence, actions are being modelled in terms of how they modify the knowledge state of the planner rather than in terms of how they modify the physical world. We have constructed a planner to utilize this representation and we use it to show that on many common problems this more abstract representation is perfectly adequate for solving the planning problem, and that in fact it scales better and supports features that make it applicable to much richer domains and problems.