AI

MOD - 5

1. What is Planning? Explain types of planning algorithms.

❖ Planning is a fundamental problem-solving process in artificial intelligence (AI)
and computer science.
❖ It involves creating a sequence of actions or a strategy to achieve specific goals
or objectives in an environment.
❖ The primary goal of planning is to determine a course of action that transforms
an initial state of the world into a desired goal state while satisfying certain
constraints and optimizing some criteria
.
Here are some of the main types of planning algorithms:

1. Classical Planning:

❖ Definition: Classical Planning is a type of planning used in artificial intelligence

where an agent exploits the problem's inherent structure to create intricate action
plans.

❖ Agent's Tasks: In Classical Planning, the agent performs three primary tasks:
❖ Planning: The agent formulates a plan once it understands the problem and its
structure.
❖ Acting: It decides on the specific actions to execute the plan and work toward its
objectives.
❖ Learning: As the agent takes actions, it learns and gains new insights.

❖ Representation: Classical Planning often uses a language called PDDL (Planning

Domain Definition Language) to represent actions within the problem domain.
PDDL helps represent actions in a structured manner.

❖ Key Components Described by PDDL:

❖ Initial State: It represents the starting conditions of the problem as a conjunction

of ground and functionless atoms.
❖ Actions: Actions are defined using action schemas that implicitly specify the
ACTION() and RESULT() functions, describing how actions affect the state.
❖ Result: The result component is derived from the set of actions performed by the
agent.
❖ Goal: The goal is defined as a precondition, representing a conjunction of literals,
which can be either positive or negative, that must be satisfied for the problem to
be considered solved.
2. Heuristic Planning:

❖ Characteristics: Heuristic Planning is a planning approach that employs

heuristics to guide the planning process and make informed decisions.

❖ Forward Planning: Heuristic Planning often leans towards forward planning as

the preferred approach. This is primarily due to the availability of highly effective
general-purpose and problem-specific heuristics for forward planners.

❖ Effective Heuristics: One key advantage of forward planners is their ability to

utilize very good general-purpose and problem-specific heuristics, which have
been discovered and proven effective. These heuristics aid in the decision-
making process and improve planning efficiency.

❖ Example Heuristic: A notable general-purpose forward planning heuristic is the

strategy of ignoring preconditions of actions. This technique yields a relaxed
version of the planning problem, which remains challenging but can be efficiently
approximated using specialized algorithms.

❖ Planning Graphs: Another valuable technique in heuristic planning is the creation

of planning graphs. Planning graphs provide estimations of the number of actions
required to achieve a particular goal. They contribute to the development of
complete planners like GraphPlan.

3. Algorithms for classical planning

Forward State Space Planning (FSSP)
- FSSP behaves in the same way as forwarding state-space search.
- It says that given an initial state S in any domain, we perform some necessary
actions and obtain a new state S', called a progression.
-It continues until we reach the target position. Action should be taken in this matter.
Disadvantage: Large branching factor
Advantage: The algorithm is Sound

Backward State Space Planning (BSSP)

- BSSP behaves similarly to backward state-space search.
-In this, we move from the target state g to the sub-goal g, tracing the previous action
to achieve that goal.
- This process is called regression (going back to the previous goal or sub-goal).
- These sub-goals should also be checked for consistency.
- The action should be relevant in this case.
Disadvantages: not sound algorithm (sometimes inconsistency can be found)
Advantage: Small branching factor (much smaller than FSSP)