Some results on the complexity of planning with incomplete information

Abstract Planning with incomplete information may mean a number of di erent things � that certain facts of the initial state are not known, that operators can have random or nondeterministic e ects, or that the plans created contain sensing operations and are branching. Study of the complexity of incomplete information planning has so far been concentrated on probabilistic domains, where a number of results have been found. We examine the complexity of planning in nondeterministic propositional domains. This di ers from domains involving randomness, which has been well studied, in that for a nondeterministic choice, not even a probability distribution over the possible outcomes is known. The main result of this paper is that the non-branching plan existence problem in unobservable domains with an expressive operator formalism is EXPSPACE-complete. We also discuss several restrictions, which bring the complexity ofthe problem down to PSPACE-complete, and extensions to the fully an