Computational Complexity of Planning with Temporal Goals

Authors

Chitta Baral
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Raul A. Trejo

Publication Date

4-2001

Comments

UTEP-CS-01-01a.

Published in the Proceedings of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence IJCAI'01, Seattle, Washington, August 4-10, 2001, pp. 509-514.

Abstract

In the last decade, there has been several studies on the computational complexity of planning. These studies normally assume that the goal of planning is to make a certain fluent true after the sequence of actions. In many real-life planning problems, the goal is represented in a much more complicated temporal form: e.g., in addition to having a desired fluent true at the end, we may want to keep certain fluents true at all times. In this paper, we study the complexity of planning for such temporal goals. We show that for goals expressible in Linear Temporal Logic, planning has the same complexity as for non-temporal goals: it is NP-complete; and for goals expressible in a more general Branching Temporal Logic, planning is PSPACE-complete.