Contingent Planning with Goal Preferences

The importance of the problems of contingent planning with actions that have non-deterministic effects and of planning with goal preferences has been widely recognized, and several works address these two problems separately. However, combining conditional planning with goal preferences adds some new difficulties to the problem. Indeed, even the notion of optimal plan is far from trivial, since plans in nondeterministic domains can result in several different behaviors satisfying conditions with different preferences. Planning for optimal conditional plans must therefore take into account the different behaviors, and conditionally search for the highest preference that can be achieved. In this paper, we address this problem. We formalize the notion of optimal conditional plan, and we describe a correct and complete planning algorithm that is guaranteed to find optimal solutions. We implement the algorithm using BDD-based techniques, and show the practical potentialities of our approach through a preliminary experimental evaluation.