Model Update for Automated Planning

Automated planning (Ghallab, Nau, and Traverso 2004) is the artificial intelligence field that studies the process of reasoning about actions and goals, seeking for implementation of planners. Essentially, a planner is an algorithm that synthesizes a plan of actions by analyzing a formal specification of the environment’s dynamic and the agent’s goal. Since the trajectory of a plan have temporal properties that can be formally specified, formal methods based on model checking techniques have been used to guarantee the reliability of plans (Cimatti et al. 1997; Cimatti, Roveri, and Traverso 1998; Daniele, Traverso, and Vardi 1999). A planning algorithm based on model checking (Figure 2) receives a planning domain M , a planning goal φ and either returns a plan, i.e., a substructure M ⊆ M that satisfies the goal φ; or failure if there is not such a plan. Traditionally, the planning domain is represented by a Kripke structure (Kripke 1963) and the goal is specified in the Computational Tree Logic CTL (Clarke and Emerson 1982).