Heuristics for cost-optimal classical planning based on linear programming

Abstract

Many heuristics for cost-optimal planning are based on linear programming. We cover several interesting heuristics of this type by a common framework that fixes the objective function of the linear program. Within the framework, constraints from different heuristics can be combined in one heuristic estimate which dominates the maximum of the component heuristics. Different heuristics of the framework can be compared on the basis of their constraints. We present theoretical results on the relation between existing heuristics and experimental results that demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework.