Using PDDL or equivalent planning language/systems

Question

I want to do some automatic story generation demonstration and the approach I am taking is using AI planning. I have been reading several relevant papers and have figured out that PDDL is perhaps the most widely used language to form the planning problem. I have been looking at the syntax and several example codes to learn how to use it.

The part where I am stuck is how to get the planner to work. I have found out some popular planners (fast-forward, MBP, IPP) but am not being able to make them work, using the instructions even from the sources itself.

I am using Gnome Terminal on Ubuntu 13.04.

I am very new to planning and this may be a very naive question but I assure that I have been searching for more than 3-4 days without any luck. Also, suggestions on using some other planning system are welcome.

Answer 1

Well, both MBP and IPP are really, really old systems. If you're just looking for a ready-made planner to use in an off-the-shelf manner, I'd suggest you to follow the pointers leading to the authors (and software) that took part in the last International Planning Competition (2011):

http://www.plg.inf.uc3m.es/ipc2011-deterministic/ParticipatingPlanners.html

Answer 2

If you are using Linux then I strongly suggest to use Fast Downward (it has its own web page - just google it). First of all, it is currently one of the best-known planning systems in the AI planning community and, further, it is really easy to get it to run. Well, you still need half an hour or so, but there is an easy-to-follow step-by-step description telling you where to check out the code and which commands you need to run.

It has also implemented most of the known planning heuristics that are required to solve problems fast or even optimal (planning requires search and heuristics make the search "goal-oriented" rather than blind and, if the heuristic is admissible and/or monotone (depending on the kind of search algorithm that is chosen -- see fast forward and pddl: is the computed solution the best?), it guarantees to find optimal solutions).

Concerning literature, I suggest to read/skip through the following two journal articles:

Porteous, J.; Cavazza, M.; and Charles, F. 2010. Applying planning to interactive storytelling: Narrative control using state constraints. ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Tech. 10:1-10:21. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1869399

Patrik Haslum. "Narrative Planning: Compilations to Classical Planning". Journal of AI Research, vol. 44, p. 383-395, 2012 http://www.jair.org/papers/paper3602.html