Epistemic planning

Epistemic planning is the enrichment of automated planning with epistemic notions such as knowledge and belief. In general, single-agent epistemic planning considers the following problem: given an agent's current state of knowledge, and a desirable state of knowledge, how does it get from one to the other? In multi-agent epistemic planning, the current and desirable states of knowledge might also refer to the states of knowledge of other agents, including higher-order knowledge like ensuring that agent A doesn't get to know that agent B knows P. Single-agent epistemic planning is of central importance in settings where agents need to be able to reason about their own lack of knowledge and, e.g., make plans of how to achieve the required knowledge. Multi-agent epistemic planning is essential for coordination and collaboration among multiple agents, where success can only be expected if agents are able to reason about the knowledge, uncertainty and capabilities of other agents. It is a relatively recent area of research involving several sub-areas of artificial intelligence, such as automated planning, decision-theoretic planning, epistemic logic, strategic reasoning and knowledge representation & reasoning. In order to achieve formalisms and systems for epistemic planning that are both expressive and practically efficient, it is necessary to combine state of the art from several such sub-areas of artificial intelligence that have so far been considered mostly in separation. Application areas of epistemic planning include mobile service robots, explaining planning, game playing, human-robot interaction and social robotics. For this special issue of AIJ, we invited papers on theory, applications, and implemented systems of epistemic planning. In this document, we summarize the accepted papers whilst recapping the essentials of epistemic planning.