Doctoral Consortium Extended Abstract: Planning with Concurrent Transaction Logic.

Automated planning has been the subject of intensive research and is at the core of several areas of AI, including intelligent agents and robotics. In this thesis proposal, we argue that Concurrent Transaction Logic (( mathcal {CTR})) is a natural specification language for planning algorithms, which enables one to see further afield and thus discover better and more general solutions than using one-of-a-kind formalisms. Specifically, we take the well-known ( textit{STRIPS}) planning strategy and show that ( mathcal {CTR}) lets one specify the (textit{STRIPS}) planning algorithm easily and concisely, and extend it in several respects. For instance, we show that extensions to allow indirect effects and to support action ramifications come almost for free. The original ( textit{STRIPS}) planning strategy is also shown to be incomplete. Using concurrency operators in ( mathcal {CTR}), we propose a non-linear ( textit{STRIPS}) planning algorithm, which is proven to be complete. Moreover, this thesis proposal outlines several extensions of ( textit{STRIPS}) planning strategy. All of the extensions show that the use of ( mathcal {CTR}) accrues significant benefits in the area of planning.