DAE: Planning as Artificial Evolution -- (Deterministic part)

International audienceThe sub-optimal DAE planner implements the stochastic approach for domain-independent planning decomposition. The purpose of this planner is to optimize the makespan, or the number of actions, by generating ordered sequences of intermediate goals via a process of artificial evolution. For the evolutionary part we used the Evolving Objects (EO) library, and to solve each intermediate subproblem we used the constraint-based optimal temporal planner CPT. Therefore DAE can only solve problems that CPT can solve. Compression of subplans into a global solution plan is also achieved efficiently with CPT by exploiting causalities found so far. Because the selection of predicates for intermediate goal generation is still an open question, we have submitted two planners DAE1 and DAE2 that use different strategies for the generation of intermediate goals. An empirical formula has been defined to set a limit on the number of backtracks allowed for solving the intermediate subproblems