Accelerating Partial-Order Planners: Some Techniques for E ective Search Control and Pruning

We propose some domain-independent techniques for bringing well-founded partialorder planners closer to practicality. The rst two techniques are aimed at improving search control while keeping overhead costs low. One is based on a simple adjustment to the default A* heuristic used by ucpop to select plans for re nement. The other is based on preferring \zero commitment" (forced) plan re nements whenever possible, and using LIFO prioritization otherwise. A more radical technique is the use of operator parameter domains to prune search. These domains are initially computed from the de nitions of the operators and the initial and goal conditions, using a polynomial-time algorithm that propagates sets of constants through the operator graph, starting in the initial conditions. During planning, parameter domains can be used to prune nonviable operator instances and to remove spurious clobbering threats. In experiments based on modi cations of ucpop, our improved plan and goal selection strategies gave speedups by factors ranging from 5 to more than 1000 for a variety of problems that are nontrivial for the unmodi ed version. Crucially, the hardest problems gave the greatest improvements. The pruning technique based on parameter domains often gave speedups by an order of magnitude or more for di cult problems, both with the default ucpop search strategy and with our improved strategy. The Lisp code for our techniques and for the test problems is provided in on-line appendices.