A Practical Approach to Discretised PDDL+ Problems by Translation to Numeric Planning

pddl+ models are advanced models of hybrid systems and the resulting problems are notoriously difficult for planning engines to cope with. An additional limiting factor for the exploitation of pddl+ approaches in real-world applications is the restricted number of domain-independent planning engines that can reason upon those models. With the aim of deepening the understanding of pddl+ models, in this work, we study a novel mapping between a time discretisation of pddl+ and numeric planning as for pddl2.1 (level 2). The proposed mapping not only clarifies the relationship between these two formalisms but also enables the use of a wider pool of engines, thus fostering the use of hybrid planning in real-world applications. Our experimental analysis shows the usefulness of the proposed translation and demonstrates the potential of the approach for improving the solvability of complex pddl+ instances.