Are Automated Planners up to Solve Real Problems?

Abstract

It is a well known fact that the AI planning community is very committed to apply the developments already achieved in this area to real complex applications. However realistic planning problems bring great challenges not only for the designers during design processes but also for the automated planners during the planning process itself. In addition, it is quite common to face issues about whether the available planners will be up to solve the problem being modeled during the initial design stages. In this paper we present the experience, results and issues that emerged from testing the performance of the recent planners when solving a real and complex problem such as the planning of daily activities of a petroleum plant for docking, storing and distributing oil. Due to the complexity of this real planning problem, the KE tool itSIMPLE was used in order to support all the design processes such as specification, modeling and domain model analysis that resulted in a PDDL model, automatically generated by the tool, which was used as input for planners. In addition, we present the main modeling process performed for the domain model construction.