Relaxing non-interference requirements in parallel plans

Abstract

The aim of being able to reason about quantities, time or space has been the main objective of the many efforts on the integration of propositional planning with extensions to handle different theories. Planning modulo theories (PMTs) are an approximation inspired by satisfiability modulo theories (SMTs) that generalize the integration of arbitrary theories with propositional planning. Parallel plans are crucial to reduce plan lengths and hence the time needed to reach a feasible plan in many approaches. Parallelization of actions relies on the notion of (non-)interference, which is usually determined syntactically at compile time. In this paper we define a semantic notion of interference between actions in PMT. Apart from being strictly stronger than any syntactic notion of interference, we show how semantic interference can be easily and efficiently checked by calling an off-the-shelf SMT solver at compile time, constituting a technique orthogonal to the solving method.