Towards compositional automated planning

The development of efficient propositional satisfiability problem solving algorithms (SAT solvers) in the past two decades has made automated planning using SAT-solvers an established AI planning approach. Modern SAT solvers can accommodate a wide variety of planning problems with a large number of variables. However, fast computing of reasonably long plans proves challenging for planning as satisfiability. In order to address this challenge, we present a compositional approach based on abstraction refinement that iteratively generates, solves and composes partial solutions from a parameterized planning problem. We show that this approach decomposes the monolithic planning problem into smaller problems and thus significantly speeds up plan calculation, at least for a class of tested planning problems.