Abstract. This paper investigates symbolic heuristic search with BDDs for solving domain-independent action planning problems cost-optimally. By distributimpact of operators that take part in several abstractions, multiple partial symbolic pattern databases are added for an admissible heuristic, even if the selected patterns are not disjoint. As a trade-off between symbolic bidirectional and heuristic search with BDDs on rather small pattern sets, partial symbolic pattern databases are applied.