Solving Planning Tasks Hierarchically

Contents

This chapter introduces the main ideas and concepts underlying the Fast Downward planner and puts them into the context of earlier research.

In Sect. 8.1, we present a simple example to illustrate key aspects of the planner such as the exploitation of causal dependencies and the use of multi-valued state variables. Section 8.2 puts these ideas into the context of earlier research. The concluding Sect. 8.3 presents a bird’s-eye view of the overall planner architecture and provides an outlook on the chapters to come.