Domain-Independent Construction of Pattern Database Heuristics for Cost-Optimal Planning

Heuristic search is a leading approach to domain-independent planning. For cost-optimal planning, however, existing admissible heuristics are generally too weak to effectively guide the search. Pattern database heuristics (PDBs), which are abstractions of the search space, are currently one of the most promising approaches to developing better admissible heuristics. The informedness of PDB heuristics deucially on the selection of appropriate abstractions (patterns). Although PDBs have been applied to many search problems, including planning, there are not many insights into how to select good patterns, even manually. What constitutes a good pattern depends on the problem domain, making the task even more difficult for domain-independent planning, where the process needs to be completely automatic and general. We present a novel way of constructing good patterns automatically from the specification of planning problem instances. We demonstrate that this allows a domainindependent pla...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Patrik Haslum, Adi Botea, Malte Helmert, Blai Bonet, Sven Koenig
• Keywords: AAAI 2007, Admissible Heuristics, Domain-independent Planning, Heuristics, Intelligent Agents