Component Abstraction

Component abstraction is a technique that groups related low-level constants of a planning problem into more abstract entities called abstract components or, shorter, components. The idea is similar to how humans can group features connected through static relationships into one more abstract unit. For example, a robot that carries a hammer could be considered a single component, which has mobility as well as maintenance skills. Such a component can become a permanent object in the representation of the world, provided that no action can invalidate the static relation between the robot and the hammer.

Component abstraction is a two-step procedure:

1. Build the problem's static graph, which models permanent relationships between constant symbols of a problem.

2. Build abstract components with a clustering procedure. Formally, an abstract component is a connected subgraph of the static graph.