On Planning with Preferences in HTN

In this paper, we address the problem of generating preferred plans by combining the procedural control knowledge speci- fied by Hierarchical Task Networks (HTNs) with rich qualita- tive user preferences. The outcome of our work is a language for specifying user preferences, tailored to HTN planning, together with a provably optimal preference-based planner, HTNPREF, that is implemented as an extension of SHOP2. To compute preferred plans, we propose an approach based on forward-chaining heuristic search. Our heuristic uses an admissible evaluation function measuring the satisfaction of preferences over partial plans. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our HTNPREF heuristics. We prove our approach sound and optimal with respect to the plans it generates by appealing to a situation calculus seman- tics of our preference language and of HTN planning. While our implementation builds on SHOP2, the language and tech- niques proposed here are relevant to a broad range of HTN planners.