An Admissible Heuristic for SAS+ Planning Obtained from the State Equation

Abstract

Domain-independent optimal planning has seen important breakthroughs in recent years with the development of tractable and informative admissible heuristics, suitable for planners based on forward state-space search. These heuristics allow planners to optimally solve an important number of benchmark problems, including problems that are quite involved and difficult for the layman. In this paper we present a new admissible heuristic that is obtained from the state equation associated to the Petri-net representation of the planning problem. The new heuristic, that does not fall into one of the four standard classes, can be computed in polynomial time and is competitive with the current state of the art for optimal planning, as empirically demonstrated over a large number of problems, mainly because it often shows an improved quality-to-cost ratio. The new heuristic applies to SAS+ planning tasks with arbitrary non-negative action costs.