Welcome to PDDL4J’s documentation!

PDDL4J is a software library under LGPL license embedding Artificial Intelligence algorithms to find solutions for planning problems, that is to say time organized actions to achieve a goal. Solutions to planning problems are “todo lists” named plan representing operational features of actions like who, how, where, when and what to do. The code of the library is available on GitHub.

PDDL4J is a suite of solvers useful for decision problems that can be solved by a sequence of actions (plan). It is based on a declarative approach: the user states a decision problem in PDDL (Planning Domain Description language and PDDL4J generates possible solutions. No programming language and/or background is required. PDDL4J has lot of application fields like can be use in many industrial fields as smart homes/data/cities, autonomous systems and robotics, logistics, business processes etc.

Note

If you are not familiar with Automated Planning, start reading the chapter Automated Planning in a Nutshell. If you are not familiar with PDDL, start reading PDDL Tutorial.

PDDL was originally developed in 1998. It was inspired by the need to encourage the empirical comparison of planning systems and the exchange of planning benchmarks within the community. Its development improved the communication of research results and triggered an explosion in performance, expressivity and robustness of planning systems. PDDL has become a de facto standard language for describing planning domains, not only for planning competition but more widely, as it offers an opportunity to carry out empirical evaluation of planning systems on a growing collection of generally adopted standard benchmark domains. The emergence of a language standard will have an impact on the entire field, influencing what is seen as central and what peripheral in the development of planning systems.

The library contains:

  • A PDDL 3.1 parser and all the classes need to manipulate its concepts. The parser can be configured to accept only specified requirements of PDDL language.

  • A set of useful pre-processing mechanisms in order to instantiate and simply operators into ground actions.

  • A set of already implemented classical heuristics, e.g., relaxed planning graph, critical path, etc.

  • Several examples of planners using PDDL4J.

Note

To get PDDL4J and start running a planner start reading the chapter Getting Started or exploring the PDDL4J API documentation API Documentation.

Important

The library is open source. If you use it, please cite us:

D. Pellier & H. Fiorino (2017) PDDL4J: a planning domain description library for java, Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 30:1, 143-176, DOI: 10.1080/0952813X.2017.1409278