Optimizing Planning Domains by Automatic Action Schema Splitting

As modeling details can have a large impact on planner perormance, domain transformation has been a traditional subject of interest in the planning community not only betweenlanguages, but also within languages. Herein, we automatean intra-language transformation method that has as yet beenapplied only manually, and that has never been formally described: action schema splitting, which transforms an actionschema with a big interface (many parameters) into severalschemas with smaller interfaces, exponentially reducing thenumber of ground actions. We spell out this method, characterizing exactly the choice of splits preserving equivalence tothe original schema. Making that choice involves a trade-off between interface size and plan length, which we explore bydesigning automatic domain optimization methods. Our experiments show that these methods can substantially improveperformance on domains with large interfaces.