Three Approaches to Solve the Petrobras Challenge: Exploiting Planning Techniques for Solving Real-Life Logistics Problems

Abstract

The Petrobras domain is an abstraction of a real-life problem of resource-efficient transportation of goods from ports to petroleum platforms. Being a good example of a difficult problem standing on the borderline between planning and scheduling, this domain was proposed as a challenge problem at the International Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (ICKEPS 2012). In this paper we describe three different ways of modeling and solving this domain: by utilizing classical planning, temporal planning, and finally, single-player games and Monte-Carlo Tree Search.