Towards an Integration of Golog and Planning

The action language Golog has been applied successfully to the control of robots, among other things. Perhaps its greatest advantage is that a user can write programs which constrain the search for an executable plan in a flexible manner. However, when general planning is needed, Golog supports this only in principle, but does not measure up with state-of-the-art planners. In this paper we propose an integration of Golog and planning in the sense that planning problems, formulated as part of a Golog program, are solved by a modern planner during the execution of the program. Here we focus on the ADL subset of the plan language PDDL. First we show that the semantics of ADL can be understood as progression in the situation calculus, which underlies Golog, thus providing us with a correct embedding of ADL within Golog. We then show how Golog can be integrated with an existing ADL planner for closed-world initial databases and compare the performance of the resulting system with the original Golog.