Tutorial: Introduction to Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) Planning

At ICAPS 2018, Pascal Bercher and Daniel Höller gave a half-day tutorial about Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) Planning. (They did so while both were still at Ulm University, Germany, but since both are at different affiliations right now, the material is now hosted here (as well) before it becomes unreachable due to possible wegpage re-structuring at their old affiliation/University.)

The tutorial was split into two parts, both presented by Pascal and Daniel. Topics included:

Part I:

• Standard Problem Formalization
• Features that can be compiled away
• Standard restrictions on the general problem
• Complexity results for standard problem restrictions
• Expressivity analysis

Part II:

• Solving HTN problems via plan space search
• Solving HTN problems via progression search
• Solving HTN problems via compilation to STRIPS
• Solving HTN problems via compilation to SAT
• A heuristic based on a Task-Decomposition Tree
• A family of heuristics based on a relaxed compilation
• Excursion: Introduction to non-HTN hierarchical planning formalizations

Sadly, the tutorial wasn't recorded, but you can download the slides for Part I and Part II.