Markov decision processes are of major interest in the planning community as well as in the model checking community. But in spite of the similarity in the considered formal models, the development of new techniques and methods happened largely independently in both communities. This work is intended as a beginning to unite the two research branches. We consider goal-reachability analysis as a common basis between both communities. The core of this paper is the translation from Jani, an overarching input language for quantitative model checkers, into the probabilistic planning domain definition language (PPDDL), and vice versa from PPDDL into Jani. These translations allow the creation of an overarching benchmark collection, including existing case studies from the model checking community, as well as benchmarks from the international probabilistic planning competitions (IPPC). We use this benchmark set as a basis for an extensive empirical comparison of various approaches from the model checking community, variants of value iteration, and MDP heuristic search algorithms developed by the AI planning community. On a per benchmark domain basis, techniques from one community can achieve state-ofthe-art performance in benchmarks of the other community. Across all benchmark domains of one community, the performance comparison is however in favor of the solvers and algorithms of that particular community. Reasons are the design of the benchmarks, as well as tool-related limitations. Our translation methods and benchmark collection foster crossfertilization between both communities, pointing out specific opportunities for widening the scope of solvers to different kinds of models, as well as for exchanging and adopting algorithms across communities.

It has previously been observed that the verification of safety properties in deterministic model-checking frameworks can be compiled into classical planning. A similar connection exists between goal probability analysis on either side, yet that connection has not been explored. We fill that gap with a translation from Jani, an input language for quantitative model checkers including the Modest toolset and PRISM, into PPDDL. Our experiments motivate further cross-fertilization between both research areas, specifically the exchange of algorithms. Our study also initiates the creation of new benchmarks for goal probability analysis.