On domain generators for the evaluation of action reversibility in STRIPS

Abstract Robustness is a crucial requirement for the deployment of AI systems in real-world scenarios. In the context of AI planning, the concept of action reversibility, i.e., the ability to undo the effects of an action using a reverse plan, is a promising direction for achieving robust plans. Plans composed exclusively of reversible actions exhibit resilience against goal changes during the execution of the plan. However, the evaluation of action reversibility systems in STRIPS planning presents a challenge, given that standard planning benchmarks are often not suitable. Early experiments using a naive implementation of an action reversibility algorithm show that the available domain generation approach is susceptible to bias. Building on this existing domain generator, we introduce two slight variations that exhibit entirely different search space characteristics. We assess these domain generators using the naive action reversibility implementation and existing ASP implementations, and demonstrate that different generators indeed favor different implementations. As a follow-up to this line of research, we present a generalized domain generator facilitating the creation of domains with diverse search space characteristics. To finally reduce the utilization of contrived generation patterns, we propose another domain generator based on the Barabási-Albert model yielding less rigid domains. Our experiments demonstrate that these new domain generators can produce a variety of domains with diverse search space characteristics, enabling a less biased evaluation of action reversibility systems.