Linear temporal logic as an executable semantics for planning languages

This paper presents an approach to artificial intelligence planning based on linear temporal logic (LTL). A simple and easy-to-use planning language is described, PDDL-K (Planning Domain Description Language with control Knowledge), which allows one to specify a planning problem together with heuristic information that can be of help for both pruning the search space and finding better quality plans. The semantics of the language is given in terms of a translation into a set of LTL formulae. Planning is then reduced to “executing” the LTL encoding, i.e. to model search in LTL. The feasibility of the approach has been successfully tested by means of the system Pdk, an implementation of the proposed method.