AI Planning for Hybrid Systems

When planning the tasks of some physical entities that need to perform actions in the world (e.g., a Robot) it is necessary to take into account quite complex models for ensuring that the plan is actually executable. Indeed the state of these systems evolves according to potentially non-linear dynamics where interdependent discrete and continuous changes happen over the entire course of the task. Systems of this kind are typically compactly represented in planning using languages mixing propositional logic and mathematics. However, these languages are still poorly understood and exploited. What are the difficulties for planning in these settings? How can we build systems that can scale up over realistically sized problems? What are the domains which can benefit from these languages? This short paper shows the main two ingredients that are needed to build a heuristic search planner, outline the main impact that such techniques have on application, and provide some open challenges. These models and relative planners hold the promise to deliver explainable AI solutions that do not rely on large amounts of data.