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304
Planning as heuristic search,
- 5 – 33, ISSN
, 2001
"... Abstract In the AIPS98 Planning Contest, the HSP planner showed that heuristic search planners can be competitive with state-of-the-art Graphplan and SAT planners. Heuristic search planners like HSP transform planning problems into problems of heuristic search by automatically extracting heuristics ..."
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Cited by 421 (33 self)
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Abstract In the AIPS98 Planning Contest, the HSP planner showed that heuristic search planners can be competitive with state-of-the-art Graphplan and SAT planners. Heuristic search planners like HSP transform planning problems into problems of heuristic search by automatically extracting heuristics from Strips encodings. They differ from specialized problem solvers such as those developed for the 24-Puzzle and Rubik's Cube in that they use a general declarative language for stating problems and a general mechanism for extracting heuristics from these representations. In this paper, we study a family of heuristic search planners that are based on a simple and general heuristic that assumes that action preconditions are independent. The heuristic is then used in the context of best-first and hill-climbing search algorithms, and is tested over a large collection of domains. We then consider variations and extensions such as reversing the direction of the search for speeding node evaluation, and extracting information about propositional invariants for avoiding dead-ends. We analyze the resulting planners, evaluate their performance, and explain when they do best. We also compare the performance of these planners with two state-of-the-art planners, and show that the simplest planner based on a pure best-first search yields the most solid performance over a large set of problems. We also discuss the strengths and limitations of this approach, establish a correspondence between heuristic search planning and Graphplan, and briefly survey recent ideas that can reduce the current gap in performance between general heuristic search planners and specialized solvers.
GSAT and Dynamic Backtracking
- Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
, 1994
"... There has been substantial recent interest in two new families of search techniques. One family consists of nonsystematic methods such as gsat; the other contains systematic approaches that use a polynomial amount of justification information to prune the search space. This paper introduces a new te ..."
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Cited by 386 (15 self)
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There has been substantial recent interest in two new families of search techniques. One family consists of nonsystematic methods such as gsat; the other contains systematic approaches that use a polynomial amount of justification information to prune the search space. This paper introduces a new technique that combines these two approaches. The algorithm allows substantial freedom of movement in the search space but enough information is retained to ensure the systematicity of the resulting analysis. Bounds are given for the size of the justification database and conditions are presented that guarantee that this database will be polynomial in the size of the problem in question. 1 INTRODUCTION The past few years have seen rapid progress in the development of algorithms for solving constraintsatisfaction problems, or csps. Csps arise naturally in subfields of AI from planning to vision, and examples include propositional theorem proving, map coloring and scheduling problems. The probl...
Metaheuristics in combinatorial optimization: Overview and conceptual comparison
- ACM COMPUTING SURVEYS
, 2003
"... The field of metaheuristics for the application to combinatorial optimization problems is a rapidly growing field of research. This is due to the importance of combinatorial optimization problems for the scientific as well as the industrial world. We give a survey of the nowadays most important meta ..."
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Cited by 314 (17 self)
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The field of metaheuristics for the application to combinatorial optimization problems is a rapidly growing field of research. This is due to the importance of combinatorial optimization problems for the scientific as well as the industrial world. We give a survey of the nowadays most important metaheuristics from a conceptual point of view. We outline the different components and concepts that are used in the different metaheuristics in order to analyze their similarities and differences. Two very important concepts in metaheuristics are intensification and diversification. These are the two forces that largely determine the behaviour of a metaheuristic. They are in some way contrary but also complementary to each other. We introduce a framework, that we call the I&D frame, in order to put different intensification and diversification components into relation with each other. Outlining the advantages and disadvantages of different metaheuristic approaches we conclude by pointing out the importance of hybridization of metaheuristics as well as the integration of metaheuristics and other methods for optimization.
Planning as Heuristic Search: New Results
- IN PROCEEDINGS OF ECP-99
, 1999
"... In the recent AIPS98 Planning Competition, the hsp planner, based on a forward state search and a domain-independent heuristic, showed that heuristic search planners can be competitive with state of the art Graphplan and Satisfiability planners. hsp solved more problems than the other planners b ..."
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Cited by 200 (14 self)
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In the recent AIPS98 Planning Competition, the hsp planner, based on a forward state search and a domain-independent heuristic, showed that heuristic search planners can be competitive with state of the art Graphplan and Satisfiability planners. hsp solved more problems than the other planners but it often took more time or produced longer plans. The main bottleneck in hsp is the computation of the heuristic for every new state. This computation may take up to 85% of the processing time. In this paper, we present a solution to this problem that uses a simple change in the direction of the search. The new planner, that we call hspr, is based on the same ideas and heuristic as hsp, but searches backward from the goal rather than forward from the initial state. This allows hspr to compute the heuristic estimates only once. As a result, hspr can produce better plans, often in less time. For example, hspr solves each of the 30 logistics problems from Kautz and Selman in less than 3 seconds. This is two orders of magnitude faster than blackbox. At the same time
Bridging the gap between planning and scheduling
- KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING REVIEW
, 2000
"... Planning research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has often focused on problems where there are cascading levels of action choice and complex interactions between actions. In contrast, Scheduling research has focused on much larger problems where there is little action choice, but the resulting orde ..."
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Cited by 118 (12 self)
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Planning research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has often focused on problems where there are cascading levels of action choice and complex interactions between actions. In contrast, Scheduling research has focused on much larger problems where there is little action choice, but the resulting ordering problem is hard. In this paper, we give an overview of AI planning and scheduling techniques, focusing on their similarities, differences, and limitations. We also argue that many difficult practical problems lie somewhere between planning and scheduling, and that neither area has the right set of tools for solving these vexing problems.
Deterministic Job-Shop Scheduling: Past, Present and Future
- European Journal of Operational Research
, 1998
"... :- Due to the stubborn nature of the deterministic job-shop scheduling problem many solutions proposed are of hybrid construction cutting across the traditional disciplines. The problem has been investigated from a variety of perspectives resulting in several analytical techniques combining generic ..."
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Cited by 107 (2 self)
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:- Due to the stubborn nature of the deterministic job-shop scheduling problem many solutions proposed are of hybrid construction cutting across the traditional disciplines. The problem has been investigated from a variety of perspectives resulting in several analytical techniques combining generic as well as problem specific strategies. We seek to assess a subclass of this problem in which the objective is minimising makespan, by providing an overview of the history, the techniques used and the researchers involved. The sense and direction of their work is evaluated by assessing the reported results of their techniques on the available benchmark problems. From these results the current situation and pointers for future work are provided. KEYWORDS:- Scheduling Theory; Job-Shop; Review; Computational Study; 1. INTRODUCTION Current market trends such as consumer demand for variety, shorter product life cycles and competitive pressure to reduce costs have resulted in the need for zero i...
A Heuristic Estimator for Means-Ends Analysis in Planning
- In Proc. Third Int. Conf. on AI Planning Systems (AIPS-96
, 1996
"... Means-ends analysis is a seemingly well understood search technique, which can be described, using planning terminology, as: keep adding actions that are feasible and achieve pieces of the goal. Unfortunately, it is often the case that no action is both feasible and relevant in this sense. The tradi ..."
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Cited by 96 (7 self)
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Means-ends analysis is a seemingly well understood search technique, which can be described, using planning terminology, as: keep adding actions that are feasible and achieve pieces of the goal. Unfortunately, it is often the case that no action is both feasible and relevant in this sense. The traditional answer is to make subgoals out of the preconditions of relevant but infeasible actions. These subgoals become part of the search state. An alternative, surprisingly good, idea is to recompute the entire subgoal hierarchy after every action. This hierarchy is represented by a greedy regression-match graph. The actions near the leaves of this graph are feasible and relevant to a sub. . . subgoals of the original goal. Furthermore, each subgoal is assigned an estimate of the number of actions required to achieve it. This number can be shown in practice to be a useful heuristic estimator for domains that are otherwise intractable. Keywords: planning, search, means-ends analysis Reinven...
Depth-bounded Discrepancy Search
- In Proceedings of IJCAI-97
, 1997
"... Many search trees are impractically large to explore exhaustively. Recently, techniques like limited discrepancy search have been proposed for improving the chance of finding a goal in a limited amount of search. Depth-bounded discrepancy search offers such a hope. The motivation behind depth-bounde ..."
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Cited by 88 (0 self)
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Many search trees are impractically large to explore exhaustively. Recently, techniques like limited discrepancy search have been proposed for improving the chance of finding a goal in a limited amount of search. Depth-bounded discrepancy search offers such a hope. The motivation behind depth-bounded discrepancy search is that branching heuristics are more likely to be wrong at the top of the tree than at the bottom. We therefore combine one of the best features of limited discrepancy search -- the ability to undo early mistakes -- with the completeness of iterative deepening search. We show theoretically and experimentally that this novel combination outperforms existing techniques. 1 Introduction On backtracking, depth-first search explores decisions made against the branching heuristic (or "discrepancies "), starting with decisions made deep in the search tree. However, branching heuristics are more likely to be wrong at the top of the tree than at the bottom. We would like theref...
A constraint-based method for project scheduling with time windows
- Journal of Heuristics
, 2002
"... This paper presents a heuristic algorithm for solving RCPSP/max, the resource constrained project scheduling problem with generalized precedence relations. The algorithm relies, at its core, on a constraint satisfaction problem solving (CSP) search procedure, which generates a consistent set of acti ..."
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Cited by 87 (30 self)
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This paper presents a heuristic algorithm for solving RCPSP/max, the resource constrained project scheduling problem with generalized precedence relations. The algorithm relies, at its core, on a constraint satisfaction problem solving (CSP) search procedure, which generates a consistent set of activity start times by incrementally removing resource conflicts from an otherwise temporally feasible solution. Key to the effectiveness of the CSP search procedure is its heuristic strategy for conflict selection. A conflict sampling method biased toward selection of minimal conflict sets that involve activities with higher-capacity requests is introduced, and coupled with a non-deterministic choice heuristic to guide the base conflict resolution process. This CSP search is then embedded within a larger iterative-sampling search framework to broaden search space coverage and promote solution optimization. The efficacy of the overall heuristic algorithm is demonstrated empirically on
Using Regression-Match Graphs to Control Search in Planning
- Artificial Intelligence
, 1999
"... Classical planning is the problem of finding a sequence of actions to achieve a goal given an exact characterization of a domain. An algorithm to solve this problem is presented, which searches a space of plan prefixes, trying to extend one of them to a complete sequence of actions. It is guided by ..."
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Cited by 77 (3 self)
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Classical planning is the problem of finding a sequence of actions to achieve a goal given an exact characterization of a domain. An algorithm to solve this problem is presented, which searches a space of plan prefixes, trying to extend one of them to a complete sequence of actions. It is guided by a heuristic estimator based on regression-match graphs, which attempt to characterize the entire subgoal structure of the remaining part of the problem. These graphs simplify the structure by neglecting goal interactions and by assuming that variables in goal conjunctions should be bound in such a way as to make as many conjuncts as possible true without further work. In some domains, these approximations work very well, and experiments show that many classical-planning problems can solved with very little search. 1 Definition of the Problem The classical planning problem is to generate a sequence of actions that make a given proposition true, in a domain in which there is perfect informati...
