Additive Merge-and-Shrink Heuristics for Diverse Action Costs

In many planning applications, actions can have highly diverse costs. Recent studies focus on the effects of diverse action costs on search algorithms, but not on their effects on domain-independent heuristics. In this paper, we demonstrate there are negative impacts of action cost diversity on merge-and-shrink (M&S), a successful abstraction method for producing high-quality heuristics for planning problems. We propose a new cost partitioning method to address the negative effects of diverse action costs on M&S. We investigate nonunit cost IPC domains, especially those for which diverse action costs have severe negative effects on the quality of the M&S heuristic. Our experiments demonstrate that in these domains, an additive set of M&S heuristics using the new cost partitioning method produces much more informative and effective heuristics than creating a single M&S heuristic which directly encodes diverse costs.