Whereas previous work on non-deterministic planning has focused on characterizing (and computing) "loopy" but "closed" plans, we look here at the kind of environments that these plans are to be executed in. In particular, we provide a logical characterization of the standard "fairness'' assumption used, and show that strong cyclic plans are correct solution concepts for fair environments.  We argue then that such logical characterization allows us to recast non-deterministic planning as a reactive synthesis task, and show that for a special case, recent efficient synthesis techniques can be applied.

We address the problem of computing a policy for fully observable non-deterministic (FOND) planning problems. By focusing on the relevant aspects of the state of the world, we introduce a series of improvements to the previous state of the art and extend the applicability of our planner, PRP, to work in an online setting. The use of state relevance allows our policy to be exponentially more succinct in representing a solution to a FOND problem for some domains. Through the introduction of new techniques for avoiding deadends and determining sufficient validity conditions, PRP has the potential to compute a policy up to several orders of magnitude faster than previous approaches. We also find dramatic improvements over the state of the art in online replanning when we treat suitable probabilistic domains as FOND domains.

When planning in an uncertain environment, one is often interested in finding a contingent plan that prescribes appropriate actions for all possible states that may be encountered during the execution of the plan. We consider the problem of finding strong cyclic plans for fully observable nondeterministic (FOND) planning problems. The algorithm we choose is LAO*, an informed explicit state search algorithm. We investigate the use of pattern database (PDB) heuristics to guide LAO* towards goal states. To obtain a fully domain-independent planning system, we use an automatic pattern selection procedure that performs local search in the space of pattern collections. The evaluation of our system on the FOND benchmarks of the Uncertainty Part of the International Planning Competition 2008 shows that our approach is competitive with symbolic regression search in terms of problem coverage, speed, and plan quality.