Issues of Automated Software Composition in AI Planning

Automated programming aims at automatically assembling a new software artifact from existing software modules. Although automated programming was revitalized through automated software composition in the last decade, the problem cannot be considered solved. Automated software composition is widely accepted as being a planning task, but the problem is that it has very special properties that other planning problems do not have and that are commonly overseen. These properties usually imply that the composition problem cannot be solved with standard planning tools. This paper gives a brief and intuitive description of the planning problem that most approaches are based on. It points out special properties of this problem and explains why it is not adequate to solve the problem with classical planning tools as done by most existing approaches.