Boosting optimal symbolic planning: Operator-potential heuristics

Heuristic search guides the exploration of states via heuristic functions h estimating remaining cost. Symbolic search instead replaces the exploration of individual states with that of state sets, compactly represented using binary decision diagrams (BDDs). In cost-optimal planning, heuristic explicit search performs best overall, but symbolic search performs best in many individual domains, so both approaches together constitute the state of the art. Yet combinations of the two have so far not been an unqualified success, because (i) h must be applicable to sets of states rather than individual ones, and (ii) the different state partitioning induced by h may be detrimental for BDD size. Many competitive heuristic functions in planning do not qualify for (i), and it has been shown that even extremely informed heuristics can deteriorate search performance due to (ii).

Here we show how to achieve (i) for a state-of-the-art family of heuristic functions, namely potential heuristics. These assign a fixed potential value to each state-variable/value pair, ensuring by LP constraints that the sum over these values, for any state, yields an admissible and consistent heuristic function. Our key observation is that we can express potential heuristics through fixed potential values for operators instead, capturing the change of heuristic value induced by each operator. These reformulated heuristics satisfy (i) because we can express the heuristic value change as part of the BDD transition relation in symbolic search steps. We run exhaustive experiments on IPC benchmarks, evaluating several different instantiations of potential heuristics in forward, backward, and bi-directional symbolic search. Our operator-potential heuristics turn out to be highly beneficial, in particular they hardly ever suffer from (ii). Our best configurations soundly beat previous optimal symbolic planning algorithms, bringing them on par with the state of the art in optimal heuristic explicit search planning in overall performance.