On Creating Complementary Pattern Databases

On Creating Complementary Pattern Databases

Santiago Franco, Álvaro Torralba, Levi H. S. Lelis, Mike Barley

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4302-4309. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2017/601

A pattern database (PDB) for a planning task is a heuristic function in the form of a lookup table that contains optimal solution costs of a simplified version of the task. In this paper we introduce a method that sequentially creates multiple PDBs which are later combined into a single heuristic function. At a given iteration, our method uses estimates of the A* running time to create a PDB that complements the strengths of the PDBs created in previous iterations. We evaluate our algorithm using explicit and symbolic PDBs. Our results show that the heuristics produced by our approach are able to outperform existing schemes, and that our method is able to create PDBs that complement the strengths of other existing heuristics such as a symbolic perimeter heuristic.
Keywords:
Planning and Scheduling: Planning Algorithms
Combinatorial & Heuristic Search: Meta-Reasoning and Meta-heuristics
Combinatorial & Heuristic Search: Heuristic Search
Combinatorial & Heuristic Search: Combinatorial search/optimisation