---
title: "Admissible Pruning Strategies based on plan minimality for Plan-Space Planning"
authors:
  - "Subbarao Kambhampati"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1995/210"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1995/0210.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1995
pages: "1627-1634"
track: "Planning"
keywords:
---

# Admissible Pruning Strategies based on plan minimality for Plan-Space Planning

Subbarao Kambhampati

*Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1627-1634.

## Abstract

Although plan-space planners have been shown to be flexible and efficient in plan generation. they do suffer from the problem of "looping" -- that is, they may spend an inordinate amount of time doing locally seemingly useful but globally useless refinements. In this paper. I review the anatomy of looping and argue that looping is intimately tied to the production of non-minimal solutions. I then propose two classes of admissible pruning techniques based on the notion of plan minimality. I show that the first one is admissible for planners which do not protect their establishments. but allow a precondition to be reestablished any number of times. The second one is admissible for planners which protect their establishments through causal links. I also discuss the complexity of the proposed pruning strategies, and their potential applications.