Plan Recognition As Planning

Abstract

In this work we aim to narrow the gap between plan recognition and planning by exploiting the powerand generality of recent planning algorithms for recognizing the set G* of goals G that explain a sequenceof observations given a domain theory. After providing a crisp definition of this set, we showby means of a suitable problem transformation that a goal G belongs to G* if there is an action sequence p that is an optimal plan for both the goal G and the goal G extended with extra goals representing the observations. Exploiting this result, we show how the set G* can be computed exactly and approximately by minor modifications of existing optimal and suboptimal planning algorithms, and existing polynomial heuristics. Experiments over several domains show that the suboptimal planning algorithms and the polynomial heuristics provide good approximations of the optimal goal set G* whilescaling up as well as state-of-the-art planning algorithms and heuristics.