Technical Report No. 118 - Abstract

B. Nebel
What is the Expressive Power of Disjunctive Preconditions?

While there seems to be a general consensus about the expressive power of a number of language features in planning formalisms, one can find many different statements about the expressive power of disjunctive preconditions. Using the ``compilability framework,'' we show that preconditions in conjunctive normal form add to the expressive power of propositional STRIPS, which confirms a conjecture by Bäckström. Further, we show that preconditions in conjunctive normal form do not add any expressive power once we have conditional effects.