Verifying solutions of hierarchical planning problems

Plan-Verification is the task of determining whether a plan is a solution to a given planning problem. Any plan verifier has, apart from showing that verifying plans is possible in practice, a wide range of possible applications. These include mixed-initiative planning, where a user is integrated into the planning process, and local search, e.g., for post-optimising plans or for plan repair. In addition to its practical interest, plan verification is also a problem worth investigating for theoretical reasons. Recent work showed plan verification for hierarchical planning problems to be NP-complete, as opposed to classical planning where it is in P. As such, plan verification for hierarchical planning problem was – until now – not possible. We describe the first plan verifier for hierarchical planning. It uses a translation of the problem into a SAT formula. Further we conduct an empirical evaluation, showing that the correct output is produced within acceptable time.