A Multi-Path Compilation Approach to Contingent Planning

We describe a new sound and complete method for compiling contingentplanning problems with sensing actions into classical planning.Our method encodes conditional plans within a linear, classical plan.This allows our planner, MPSR, to reason about multiple future outcomes of sensingactions, and makes it less susceptible to dead-ends.MPRS, however, generates very large classical planningproblems. To overcome this, we use an incomplete variantof the method, based on state sampling, within an online replanner. On most current domains, MPSR finds plans faster, although its plans are often longer. But on a new challenging variant of Wumpus with dead-ends,it finds smaller plans, faster, and scales better.