Jörg Hoffmann
Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
Programming Logics Group
Room 616, Phone 9325-216
Email: hoffmann@mpi-sb.mpg.de
The lecture covers the known methods for Automatic Planning, a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence. The task, which is also relevant in other fields such as Model-Checking, is to automatically solve the ``reachability problem'' in declaratively specified transition systems. Given a set of transition rules, an initial state, and a (non-temporal) goal formula, the reachability problem asks for the existence of a transition sequence that transforms the initial state into a state that satisfies the goal formula. Solving this problem is hard even for very restrictive classes of transition rules and goal formulas. The focus of the lecture lies on the techniques that have most successfully been used to solve the problem efficiently, in Automatic Planning.