Compiling Away Soft Trajectory Constraints in Planning.

Soft goals in planning are optional objectives that should be achieved in the terminal state. However, failing to achieve them does not result in the plan becoming invalid. State trajectory constraints are hard requirements towards the state trajectory of the plan. Soft trajectory constraints are a combination of both: soft preferences on how the hard goals are reached, i.e., optional requirements towards the state trajectory of the plan. Such a soft trajectory constraint may require that some fact should be always true, or should be true at some point during the plan. The quality of a plan is then measured by a metric which adds the sum of all action costs and a penalty for each failed soft trajectory constraint. Keyder and Geffner showed that soft goals can be compiled away. We generalize this approach and illustrate a method of compiling soft trajectory constraints into conditional effects and state dependent action costs using LTLf and deterministic finite automata. We provide two compilation schemes, with and without reward shaping, by rewarding and penalizing different states in the plan. With this we are able to handle such soft trajectory constraints without the need of altering the search algorithm or heuristics, using classical planners.