Task Interaction in an HTN Planner

Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning uses task decomposition to plan for an executable sequence of actions as a solution to a problem. In order to reason effectively, an HTN planner needs expressive domain knowledge. For instance, a simplified HTN planning system such as JSHOP2 uses such expressivity and avoids some task interactions due to the increased complexity of the planning process. We address the possibility of simplifying the domain representation needed for an HTN planner to find good solutions, especially in real-world domains describing home and building automation environments. We extend the JSHOP2 planner to reason about task interaction that happens when task’s effects are already achieved by other tasks. The planner then prunes some of the redundant searches that can occur due to the planning process’s interleaving nature. We evaluate the original and our improved planner on two benchmark domains. We show that our planner behaves better by using simplified domain knowledge and outperforms JSHOP2 in a number of relevant cases.