Epistemic Planning: Recent Advancements and Future Directions (Tutorial, ICAPS 2025)

This tutorial provides an accessible account on the recent results in epistemic planning based on Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL), a formalism for reasoning about knowledge and belief in multi-agent systems. The talk is structured in two parts. In the first part, we introduce the foundational concepts of epistemic logic and DEL, assuming no prior background. We start with an informal discussion on the notions of knowledge and belief, and we then move towards the full DEL-based planning framework by gradually extending the classical planning formalism with features such as uncertainty, partial observability, non-determinism, and higher-order reasoning. We illustrate each feature by showing incrementally complex examples based on a generalization of the well-known Blocks World problem of classical planning. In the second part, we explore recent advancements in the field. From a theoretical perspective, we present the main (un)decidability and complexity results for the epistemic plan existence problem, offering insight into the computational challenges of epistemic planning. From a practical standpoint, we showcase a wide range of techniques developed to address such challenges, that have enabled efficient implementations despite the inherent hardness of the problem. We conclude the tutorial by glancing at the current main challenges and compelling future directions in epistemic planning.

Alessandro Burigana