Planning in the Browser

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.