Planning in the Browser

Summary

Traditionally, planning tools are designed as applications that users need to install, taking care of the specificities of their operating system, packages, etc. This often places a significant burden on users, especially due to the academic nature of the software. To remedy this situation, here we propose for planning to jump onto the growing trend of light-weight software use: We demonstrate the possibility to run planning tools directly in the browser. We used the emscripten framework to port Fast Downward into WebAssembly (WASM) code, which allows for in-browser execution at near-native speeds. This allows for in-browser PDDL editing and planner execution without the need for server-side resource management. Moreover, it opens up a host of new possibilities, ranging from the interactive presentation of planning-based analysis to new applications exploiting the availability of planning in browsers to perform user-centric analyses.