The 1998 AI Planning Systems Competition

Abstract

The 1998 Planning Competition at the AI Planning Systems Conference was the first of its kind. Its goal was to create planning domains that a wide variety of planning researchers could agree on, so as to make comparison among planners more meaningful, measure overall progress in the field, and set up a framework for long-term creation of a repository of problems in a standard notation. A rules committee for the competition was created in 1997, and had long discussions on how the contest should go. One result of those discussions was the PDDL notation for planning domains. This notation was used to set up a set of planning problems, and to get a modest problem repository started. As a result, five planning systems were able to compete when the contest took place, in June, 1998. All of these systems solved problems in the Strips framework, with some slight extensions. The attempt to find domains for other forms of planning foundered because of technical and organizational pr...