168 Chapter 8 Constraint Satisfaction Techniques
important in plan-space or Graphplan approaches within the disjunctive-refinement
framework. Other instances of CSP techniques will be discussed in the rest of book,
in particular with regard to planning with time and resources (Part IV). CSPs are also
relevant for planning because several planning heuristics (Chapter 9) and extensions
to classical planning, in particular, can rely on CSP techniques.
This chapter provides a general introduction to CSP techniques, as well as some
developments on their specific use in planning. The chapter first reviews the essential
definitions and concepts of CSPs over finite domains (Section 8.2). It then presents
an approach for encoding a planning problem into a CSP