Planning is a crucial skill for any autonomous agent, be it a physically embedded agent, such as a robot, or a purely simulated software agent. For this reason, planning, as a central research area of artificial intelligence from its beginnings, has gained even more attention and importance recently.

After giving a general introduction to AI planning, the book describes and carefully evaluates the algorithmic techniques used in fast-forward planning systems (FF), demonstrating their excellent performance in many wellknown benchmark domains. In advance, an original and detailed...