The UM Translog Planning Domain

Parallel Understanding Systems Group
Computer Science Department, University of Maryland at College Park

This page is currently under construction!

Introduction

This page describes the UM Translog planning domain and includes the following information.

UM Translog was developed by members of the Parallel Understanding Systems Group, under the direction of

Description

The last twenty years of AI planning research has discovered a wide variety of planning techniques such as state-space search, hierarchical planning, case-based planning and reactive planning. These techniques have been implemented in numerous planning systems (STRIPS, SNLP, UCPOP, NONLIN, SIPE). Initially, a number of simple toy domains have been devised to assist in the analysis and evaluation of planning systems and techniques. The most well known examples are ``Blocks World'' and ``Towers of Hanoi.'' As planning systems grow in sophistication and capabilities, however, there is a clear need for planning benchmarks with matching complexity to evaluate those new features and capabilities. UM Translog is a planning domain designed specifically for this purpose.

UM Translog was inspired by the CMU Transport Logistics domain developed by Manuela Veloso. UM Translog is an order of magnitude larger in size (41 actions versus 6), number of features and types interactions. It provides a rich set of entities, attributes, actions and conditions, which can be used to specify rather complex planning problems with a variety of plan interactions. The detailed set of operators provides long plans (~40 steps) with many possible solutions to the same problem, and thus this domain can also be used to evaluate the solution quality of planning systems.

UM Translog is currently being used in the evaluation of a case-based planning system, CaPER, and a hierarchical task network planning system, UMCP. It has also been used with our common lisp version of Tate's Nonlin planner, UM Nonlin.

We hope that other researchers will contribute their planning domains so that a library of benchmark planning domains can be established, similar to the benchmark library used by the machine learning community.

Documentation

 A technical report exists which defines the UM Translog domain:
o Scott Andrews, Brian Kettler, Kutluhan Erol, and James Hendler. UM Translog: A Planning Domain for the Development and Benchmarking of Planning Systems. Technical Report, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Maryland at College Park, 1995.

Status/Availability

 The latest "official" description of UM Translog is version 1 (June 1995).

Because several of these planning systems are ongoing research projects, the domain definition may change. We are distributing this domain definition and the affiliated code for using it with UM Nonlin and UMCP free of charge but without any implied guarantees or promises of support.

Currently, domain definitions are publicly available for the following planners:

Note:

If you are using UM Nonlin, is recommended that you use the "beta" version (version 1.3.5) (See the UM Nonlin page for more details.)

Getting the UM Translog Code

 If you define UM Translog for other planning systems or extend it for planning systems in which it has already been used, please let us (email hendler@cs.umd.edu). If you wish, we'll post your code here so that others can make use of it.

To FTP UM Translog, do the following:

  1. Choose a planner you want to download the UM-Translog domain definition for:
  2. When prompted by your WWW browser to save the BINARY file, enter the filename chosen in Step 1.
  3. To extract the files, issue the UNIX command:
    tar -xvf filename.tar
    where is the "filename" chosen in Step 1.

A FTP README file is available.
(The FTP instructions in the README file apply only when FTPing via the UNIX FTP command. To FTP from your WWW browser, follow the instructions above.)

Web Accessibility