PDDL: Language and planners
Prompted by a recent discussion, I went “back to the basics” and took a new look at PDDL.
The language, based on STRIPS (which I know from early courses in robotics), has undergone several improvements to make it more and more expressive. This means that, as it happened with RDFS, OWL, and their reasoners, there are different planners that make use of one version of the language or another, and finding what planner supports what version and what specific features of the language is not always easy.
The Planning.wiki website has a good review of the main versions of the languages as well as a list of (some of) the known planners. Today I also discovered the planutils project that aims to make trying different planners easier by packaging them with Docker. The setup is quite easy and using it is also relatively straightforward.
I began doing some experiments with PDDL myself, which I'll write about in another post.