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The Settlers Domain

The Settlers domain is based on resource-management computer games, in which resources must be accumulated and used to construct new resource centres, with new specialised production and capabilities. An interesting problem that this domain highlights is that the PDDL2.1 family of languages does not offer a convenient way to name objects that are created during execution of a plan. In the version used for the competition, we overcame this problem by having a selection of names available at the outset that are not initially committed to any role. When an object is constructed, an unallocated name is used to name it, assigning to the name the properties of the new object and marking the name as used. An important problem that this approach creates for most current planners is that the initial grounding of actions involves creating all possible ways in which the names could be assigned to objects and then used in various roles within the plan. This leads to a significant explosion in the size of the domain encoding. It is interesting to observe that only 6 of the 20 problems were solved by any (fully-automated) planner, and that only FF solved more than one problem. It is clear that this domain remains a challenge to planning technology, but also to the future development of PDDL2.1 in which it will be necessary to review the way in which object construction is modelled.


next up previous
Next: Analysis of Competition Performance Up: Additional Challenges Previous: The COMPLEX Satellite Domain
Derek Long 2003-11-06