Using cases utility for heuristic planning improvement

Abstract

Current efficient planners employ an informed search guided by a heuristic function that is quite expensive to compute. Thus, ordering nodes in the search tree becomes a key issue, in order to select efficiently nodes to evaluate from the successors of the current search node. In a previous work, we successfully applied a CBR approach to order nodes for evaluation, thus reducing the number of calls to the heuristic function. However, once cases were learned, they were not modified according to their utility on solving planning problems. We present in this work a scheme for learning case quality based on its utility during a validation phase. The qualities obtained determine the way in which these cases are preferred in the retrieval and replay processes. Then, the paper shows some experimental results for several benchmarks taken from the International Planning Competition (IPC). These results show the planning performance improvement when case utilities are used.