optic-clp-release

Always can run in Linux system. Tested in Ubuntu20, 18, 16.

OPTIC

This package contains OPTIC, a planner for use in problems where plan cost is determined by preferences or time-dependent goal-collection costs. For more details, see the paper "Temporal Planning with Preferences and Time-Dependent Continuous Costs", J. Benton, A. J. Coles, and A. I. Coles, ICAPS 2012.

Build

This distribution contains precompiled object files for OPTIC, and precompiled static libraries for the CBC MIP solver. As the licence applied to CBC is incompatible with the GPL, you must type:

make

...to link them together, producing optic-clp.

Note that optic-clp does not have the full functionality of OPTIC available, it does not function well in problems with Preferences, and the TIL abstraction functionality may not work reliably. It is nonetheless useful as in the absence of these, it is generally faster than optic-cplex.

For further details of TIL abstraction, see "Automated Planning for Liner Shipping Fleet Repositioning", K. Tierney, A. J. Coles, A. I. Coles, C. Kroer, A. Britt, and R. M. Jensen, ICAPS 2012.

Running

optic-clp domain.pddl problem.pddl

This runs OPTIC on the given domain and problem file, carrying on search after the first solution in an attempt to optimise quality. If you want to ignore solution costs and stop after the first solution, run:

optic-clp -N domain.pddl problem.pddl

Or, if you have an upper-bound on plan cost, run:

optic-clp -n domain.pddl problem.pddl

If you wish to insist that each solution has to be at least 10 better than the last found, run:

optic-clp '->10' domain.pddl problem.pddl

Note that the planner does not, itself, limit its time and/or memory usage. Apply these by using the relevant shell commands beforehand, e.g.:

bash ulimit -t 1800 ulimit -v 4000000 ./optic-clp domain.pddl problem.pddl

...will limit the planner to 30 minutes of CPU and 4GiB of memory.

Feedback

If you do something exciting with OPTIC, do let us know. If you tried to do something with it, but it failed, you may have found a bug. In common with POPF, the three most likely sources of bugs are:

The three most common causes of bugs (over 90% of bug reports) are:

Using ADL. ADL is supported in the conditions of preferences, in the time-dependent costs of goal-collection actions, and one or two other niche cases. We've attempted to make the planner degrade gracefully, but there are still cases where it will report problems using ADL as being unsolvable. Check there are no negative preconditions in your domain.
Domain modelling bugs. OPTIC and POPF support the full start--end semantics of PDDL 2.1, and self-overlapping actions, so errors in the temporal placement of preconditions and effects (at start, at end etc.) are more likely to cause issues with POPF than with other planners. For instance, if a 'move' action is written (erroneously) as deleting the old location at the end (rather than at the start), then POPF will consider concurrent move actions for the same vehicle; whereas planners which do not make as clear a distinction between the start and end-points of durative actions would not consider this. Thus, in domains with errors such as this, POPF might have to consider a far larger search space than other temporal planners.
If the plans don't validate, ensure you are passing the '-t 0.001' flag to VAL: the planner uses an epsilon value of 0.001, smaller than the default 0.01 value used in VAL.

If none of those apply, email as small a possible domain and problem file that cause the error you're observing to Andrew Coles: firstname.lastname@kcl.ac.uk

Licence

OPTIC is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.