Extending SAT-Plan to handle iterative actions

Many real world problems have iterative behaviors, so planners should be able to tackle such problems and generate iterative plans. Iterative actions have been considered by a few of planners, and most of the efforts have been based on linear planning. In this paper, we show how SAT-Plan, which is one of the fastest existing planners, can be extended to generate recursive plans. Generated recursive plans are similar to those that are generated by humans for iterative problems. The main idea in this work is based on the mathematical induction, and has been implemented. Results obtained from testing the extended SAT-Plan on several examples from the blocks-world domain, confirms the success of the proposed idea.

Keywords:

Planning , satisfiability , CNF , recursion , induction principle