Phase transitions of contingent planning problem (Q474510)

Summary: This paper explores the phase transitions of the contingent planning problems. We present the CONTINGENT PLAN-EXISTENCE algorithm and the CONTINGENT PLAN-NONEXISTENCE algorithm for quickly proving that the contingent planning instances have solutions and have no solutions, respectively. By analyzing the two algorithms, the phase transition area of the contingent planning problems is obtained. If the number of the actions is not greater than \(\theta_{\mathrm{ub}}\), the CONTINGENT PLAN-NONEXISTENCE algorithm can prove that nearly all the contingent planning instances have no solution. If the number of the actions is not lower than \(\theta_{\mathrm{lb}}\), the CONTINGENT PLAN-EXISTENCE algorithm can prove that nearly all the contingent planning instances have solutions.The results of the experiments show that there exist phase transitions from a region where almost all the contingent planning instances have no solution to a region where almost all the contingent planning instances have solutions.