Action planning has always played a central role in Artificial Intelligence. Given a description of the current situation, a description of possible actions and a description of the goals to be achieved, the task is to identify a sequence of actions, i.e., a plan that transforms the current situation into one that satisfies the goal description.

This monograph is a revised version of Malte Helmert's doctoral thesis, Solving Planning Tasks in Theory and Practice, written under the supervision of Professor Bernhard Nebel as thesis advisor at Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg,...