plasp: A Prototype for PDDL-Based Planning in ASP

We present a prototypical system, plasp, implementing Planning by compilation to Answer Set Programming (ASP). Our approach is inspired by Planning as Satisfiability, yet it aims at keeping the actual compilation simple in favor of modeling planning techniques by meta-programming in ASP. This has several advantages. First, ASP modelings are easily modifiable and can be studied in a transparent setting. Second, we can take advantage of available ASP grounders to obtain propositional representations. Third, we can harness ASP solvers providing incremental solving mechanisms. Finally, the ASP community gains access to a wide range of planning problems, and the planning community benefits from the knowledge representation and reasoning capacities of ASP.