The LAMA Planner: Guiding Cost-Based Anytime Planning with Landmarks

LAMA is a classical planning system based on heuristic forward search. Its core feature is the use of a pseudo-heuristic derived from landmarks, propositional formulas that must be true in every solution of a planning task. LAMA builds on the Fast Downward planning system, using finite-domain rather than binary state variables and multi-heuristic search. The latter is employed to combine the landmark heuristic with a variant of the well-known FF heuristic. Both heuristics are cost-sensitive, focusing on high-quality solutions in the case where actions have non-uniform cost. A weighted A∗ search is used with iteratively decreasing weights, so that the planner continues to search for plans of better quality until the search is terminated. LAMA showed best performance among all planners in the sequential satisficing track of the International Planning Competition 2008. In this paper we present the system in detail and investigate which features of LAMA are crucial for its performance...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: JAIR
• Authors: Silvia Richter, Matthias Westphal
• Keywords: Heuristic, JAIR 2010, LAMA, Weighted A∗ Search