Using Earley Parser for Verification of Totally Ordered Hierarchical Plans

Abstract

Hierarchical planning extends classical planning by capturing the hierarchical structure of tasks via decomposition of tasks to subtasks. Hierarchical plan verification is the problem of determining whether a given plan is valid according to that structure. As decomposition trees in totally ordered hierarchical planning domains resemble parsing trees of context-free grammars, one may exploit the techniques for context-free grammars also for hierarchical plans. In this paper, we study how the Earley parser, proposed for checking whether a given word belongs to a language defined by context-free grammar, can be extended to verification of totally ordered hierarchical plans.