Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning is a formalism that can express constraints which cannot easily be expressed by classical (non-hierarchical) planning approaches. It enables reasoning about procedural structures and domain-specific search control knowledge. Yet the cornucopia of modern heuristic search techniques remains largely unincorporated in current HTN planners, in part because it is not clear how to estimate the goal distance for a partially-ordered task network. When using SHOP2-style progression, a task network of yet unprocessed tasks is maintained during search. In the general case it can grow arbitrarily large.

Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning is showing its power in real-world planning. Although domain experts have partial hierarchical domain knowledge, it is time-consuming to specify all HTN methods, leaving them incomplete. On the other hand, traditional HTN learning approaches focus only on declarative goals, omitting the hierarchical domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel learning framework to refine HTN methods via task insertion with completely preserving the original methods. As it is difficult to identify incomplete methods without designating declarative goals for compound tasks, we introduce the notion of prioritized preference to capture the incompleteness possibility of methods. Specifically, the framework first computes the preferred completion profile w.r .t.the prioritized preference to refine the incomplete methods. Then it finds the minimal set of refined methods via a method substitution operation. Experimental analysis demonstrates that our approach is effective, especially in solving new HTN planning instances.