An LP-Based Heuristic for Optimal Planning

Abstract. One of the most successful approaches in automated planning is to use heuristic state-space search. A popular heuristic that is used by a number of state-space planners is based on relaxing the planning task by ignoring the delete effects of the actions. In several planning domains, however, this relaxation produces rather weak estimates to guide search effectively. We present a relaxation using (integer) linear programming that respects delete effects but ignores action ordering, which in a number of problems provides better distance estimates. Moreover, our approach can be used as an admissible heuristic for optimal planning. Key words: Automated planning, improving admissible heuristics, optimal relaxed planning

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CP
• Authors: Menkes van den Briel, J. Benton, Subbarao Kambhampati, Thomas Vossen
• Keywords: Admissible Heuristics, Automated Planning, CP 2007, Delete Effects, Programming Languages