CS440 Lectures https://courses.grainger.illinois.edu/cs440/fa2020/lectures/pla...

CS 440/ECE 448
Fall 2020 Classical Planning 1
Margaret Fleck

Making toast
We'd like to end up with a toasted and buttered slice of bread. So our goal is something like
holding(slice) AND toasted(slice) AND buttered(slice). The individual conjuncts, e.g.
toasted(slice), are the main subgoals.

To get toasted(slice) AND buttered(slice), we might decide we need to do this:

Heat(slice,toaster).
Spread-on(butter,slice)

But each of these actions requires some set-up:

Put-in(slice,toaster)
Heat(slice,toaster).
Take-out(slice,toaster)
Spread-on(butter,slice)

But, we can't do any of this without first getting the slice of bread and the butter. So before
anything else we should do

Open(fridge)
Open(breadbag)
Take-out(slice,breadbag)
Take-out(butter,fridge)

Here's a more-or-less final plan:

Make-Open(breadbag) --> achieves open(breadbag)

Take-out(slice,breadbag) ---> requires open(breadbag), achieves holding(slice)
Make-Open(fridge) --> achieves open(fridge)
Take-out(butter,fridge) ---> requires open(fridge), achieves holding(butter)
Put-in(slice,toaster) --> requires holding(slice), achieves in(slice,toaster)
Heat(slice,toaster) --> requires slice in toaster, achieves toasted(slice)
Take-out(slice, toaster) --> achieves holding(slice)
Put-on(slice,plate) --> requires holding(slice)
Spread(butter,slice) --> requires slice on plate, holding(butter), achieves
buttered(toast)

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Upgraded representation of the world

Plan construction is yet another application of search, but this time with a more powerful
representation of states and actions. Previously our world was represented by a small set of
variables bound to concrete values such as numbers. E.g.

Q1 = 3 (The queen in column 1 is in row 3.)

In classical planning, features of the world are encoded using predicates that take states as
objects, e.g.

open(fridge)
in(slice,toaster)

The state of the world is represented by a logical combination of predicates (e.g. AND, OR,
NOT)

open(fridge) AND NOT open(breadbag)

This style of representation makes our planner look smarter than it is. By writing "spread,"
we've implied that the computer has some ability to recognize or execute the corresponding
real-world action. That connection would have to be made by other parts of our AI system,
e.g. the image recognition system and the low-level robotics system. Frequently those
systems are a lot less general and robust than one might hope.

Upgraded representation of actions

In our previous search examples, each action set or reset the value of one variable. Actions
now take objects as parameters, e.g.

Take-out(butter,fridge)

Each action has two sets of predicates:

Preconditions: logical conditions required for an action to happen

Effects (postconditions): changes that the action makes to the state of the world

So the action take-out(butter,fridge) might have

Preconditions: in(butter,fridge), is-open(fridge)

Effects: holding(butter)

The preconditions and postconditions determine how actions can fit together into a
coherent plan. They also encode some very limited real-world knowledge about the
meaning of each action.

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Partial Ordering
Another source of difficulty in classical planning is that the action order is only partly
constrained. In our toast example, we could have this ordering:

Open(fridge)
Open(breadbag)
Take-out(slice,breadbag)
Take-out(butter,fridge)

But this ordering works just as well.

Open(breadbag)
Take-out(slice,breadbag)
Open(fridge)
Take-out(butter,fridge)

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