PLATAS – Integrating Planning and the Action Language Golog

Action programming languages like Golog allow to define complex behaviors for agents on the basis of action representations in terms of expressive (first-order) logical formalisms, making them suitable for realistic scenarios of agents with only partial world knowledge. Often these scenarios include sub-tasks that require sequential planning. While in principle it is possible to express and execute such planning sub-tasks directly in Golog, the system can performance-wise not compete with state-of-the-art planners. In this paper, we report on our efforts to integrate efficient planning and expressive action programming in the Platas project. The theoretical foundation is laid by a mapping between the planning language Pddl and the Situation Calculus, which is underlying Golog, together with a study of how these formalisms relate in terms of expressivity. The practical benefit is demonstrated by an evaluation of embedding a Pddl planner into Golog, showing a drastic increase in performance while retaining the full expressiveness of Golog.