Problem Splitting Using Heuristic Search in Landmark Orderings

Abstract

In this paper, we revisit the idea of splitting a planning problem into subproblems hopefully easier to solve with the help of landmark analysis. While this technique initially proposed in the first approaches related to landmarks has been outperformed by landmark-based heuristics, we believe that it is still a promising research direction. To this end, we propose a new method for problem splitting based on landmarks which has two advantages over the original technique: it is complete (if a solution exists, the algorithm finds it), and it uses the precedence relation over the landmarks in a more flexible way. We lay in this paper the foundations of a meta best-first search algorithm, which explores the landmark orderings to create subproblems and can use any embedded planner to solve subproblems. It opens up avenues for future research: among them are new heuristics for guiding the meta search towards the most promising orderings, different policies for generating subproblems, and influence of the embedded subplanner.