An abductive event calculus planner

In 1969 Green presented his seminal description of planning as theorem prov ing with the situation calculus. The most pleasing feature of Green's accou nt was the negligible gap between high-level logical specification and prac tical implementation. This paper attempts to reinstate the ideal of plannin g via theorem proving in a modern guise. In particular, the paper shows tha t if we adopt the event calculus as our logical formalism and employ abduct ive logic programming as our theorem proving technique, then the computatio n performed mirrors closely that of a hand-coded partial-order planning alg orithm. Soundness and completeness results for this logic programming imple mentation are given. Finally the paper shows that, if we extend the event c alculus in a natural way to accommodate compound actions, then using the sa me abductive theorem proving techniques we can obtain a hierarchical planne r. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.