Using a Goal-Agenda and Committed Actions in Real-Time Planning

In the context of real-time planning, this paper investigates the contributions of two enhancements for selecting actions. First, the agenda-driven planning enhancement ranks relevant atomic goals and solves them incrementally in a best-first manner. Second, the committed actions enhancement commits a sequence of actions to be executed at the following time steps. To assess these two enhancements, we developed a real-time planning algorithm in which action selection can be driven by a goal-agenda, and committed actions can be done. Experimental results, performed on classical planning problems, show that agenda-planning and committed actions are clear advantages in the real-time context. Used simultaneously, they enable the planner to be several orders of magnitude faster and solution plans to be shorter.