Computational complexity of planning and approximate planning in presence of incompleteness

In the last several years the computational complexity of classical planning and HTN planning have been studied. But in both cases it is assumed that the planner has complete knowledge about the initial state. Recently, there has been proposal to use 'sensing' actions to plan in presence of incompleteness. In this paper we study the complexity of planning in such cases. In our study we use the action description language A proposed in 1993 by M. Gelfond and V. Lifschitz and its extensions. The language A allows planning in the situations with complete information. It is known that, if we consider only plans of feasible (polynomial) length, the planning problem for such situations is NP-complete: even checking whether a given objective is attainable from a given initial state is NP-complete. In this paper, we show that the planning problem in presence of incompleteness is indeed harder: it belongs to the next level of complexity hierarchy (in precise terms, it is Σ ₂P- complete). To overcome the complexity of this problem, C. Baral and T. Son have proposed several approximations. We show that under certain conditions, one of these approximations - O-approximation - makes the problem NP-complete (thus indeed reducing its complexity).