Unifying SAT-based and Graph-based Planning

The Blackbox planning system unifies the planning as satisfiability framework (Kautz and Selman 1992, 1996) with the plan graph approach to STRIPS planning (Blum and Furst 1995). We show that STRIPS problems can be directly translated into SAT and efficiently solved using new randomized systematic solvers. For certain computationally challenging benchmark problems this unified approach outperforms both SATPLAN and Graphplan alone. We also demonstrate that polynomialtime SAT simplification algorithms applied to the encoded problem instances are a powerful complement to the “mutex” propagation algorithm that works directly on the plan graph.