The international planning competition (IPC) is an important driver for planning research. The general goals of the IPC include pushing the state of the art in planning technology by posing new scientific challenges, encouraging direct comparison of planning systems and techniques, developing and improving a common planning domain definition language, and designing new planning domains and problems for the research community. This paper focuses on the deterministic part of the fifth international planning competition (IPC5), presenting the language and benchmark domains that we developed for the competition, as well as a detailed experimental evaluation of the deterministic planners that entered IPC5, which helps to understand the state of the art in the field.We introduce an extension of PDDL, called PDDL3, allowing the user to express strong and soft constraints about the structure of the desired plans, as well as strong and soft problem goals. We discuss the expressive power of the new language focusing on the restricted version that was used in IPC5, for which we give some basic results about its compilability into PDDL2. Moreover, we study the relative performance of the IPC5 planners in terms of solved problems, CPU time, and plan quality; we analyse their behaviour with respect to the winners of the previous competition; and we evaluate them in terms of their capability of dealing with soft goals and constraints, and of finding good quality plans in general. Overall, the results indicate significant progress in the field, but they also reveal that some important issues remain open and require further research, such as dealing with strong constraints and computing high quality plans in metric-time domains and domains involving soft goals or constraints.

In most applications of the multilayer perceptron (MLP) the main objective is to maximize the generalization ability of the network. We show that this ability is related to the sensitivity of the output of the MLP to small input changes. Several criteria have been proposed for the evaluation of the sensitivity. We propose a new index and present a way for improving these sensitivity criteria. Some numerical experiments allow a first comparison of the efficiencies of these criteria. 1.

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Abstract. We describe an extension of graphplan to a subset of ADL that allows conditional and universally quanti ed e ects in operators in such a w ay that almost all interesting properties of the original graphplan algorithm are preserved.