Developing Domain-Independent Search Control for Europa2

In the last few years, classical planners have achieved impressive results due to the development of problem relaxation techniques for computing distance estimates. In contrast, many large temporal planning systems used for practical applications have not benefitted from these techniques. Instead, these systems rely on careful engineering of the domain knowledge, together with carefully crafted domaindependent control information. In this paper, we explain some of the characteristics of NASA’s EUROPA2 planning system that make it difficult to directly apply the heuristic techniques developed for classical planning. However, we then borrow ideas from some of these techniques to develop domain-independent heuristic techniques for EUROPA2. We show some promising initial results concerning their effec-