Cost-Partitioned Merge-and-Shrink Heuristics for Optimal Classical Planning

Cost-Partitioned Merge-and-Shrink Heuristics for Optimal Classical Planning

Silvan Sievers, Florian Pommerening, Thomas Keller, Malte Helmert

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4152-4160. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/574

Cost partitioning is a method for admissibly combining admissible heuristics. In this work, we extend this concept to merge-and-shrink (M&S) abstractions that may use labels that do not directly correspond to operators. We investigate how optimal and saturated cost partitioning (SCP) interact with M&S transformations and develop a method to compute SCPs during the computation of M&S. Experiments show that SCP significantly improves M&S on standard planning benchmarks.
Keywords:
Planning and Scheduling: Planning Algorithms
Planning and Scheduling: Search in Planning and Scheduling
Heuristic Search and Game Playing: Heuristic Search