---
title: "Toward Rational Deployment of Multiple Heuristics in A"
authors:
  - "David Tolpin"
  - "Tal Beja"
  - "Solomon Eyal Shimony"
  - "Ariel Felner"
  - "Erez Karpas"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2013/106"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2013/0106.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2013
pages: "674-679"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Toward Rational Deployment of Multiple Heuristics in A

David Tolpin, Tal Beja, Solomon Eyal Shimony, Ariel Felner, Erez Karpas

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 674-679.

## Abstract

The obvious way to use several admissible heuristics in A* is to take their maximum. In this paper we aim to reduce the time spent on computing heuristics. We discuss Lazy A*, a variant of A* where heuristics are evaluated lazily: only when they are essential to a decision to be made in the A* search process. We present a new rational meta-reasoning based scheme, Rational Lazy A*, which decides whether to compute the more expensive heuristics at all, based on a myopic value of information estimate. Both methods are examined theoretically. Empirical evaluation on several domains supports the theoretical results, and shows that Lazy A* and Rational Lazy A* are state-of-the-art heuristic combination methods.