Scaling-up Generalized Planning as Heuristic Search with Landmarks
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Landmarks are one of the most effective search heuristics for classical planning, but largely ignored in generalized planning. Generalized planning (GP) is usually addressed as a combinatorial search in a given space of algorithmic solutions, where candidate solutions are evaluated w.r.t. the instances they solve. This type of solution evaluation ignores any sub-goal information that is not explicit in the representation of the planning instances, causing plateaus in the space of candidate generalized plans. Furthermore, node expansion in GP is a run-time bottleneck since it requires evaluating every child node over the entire batch of classical planning instances in a GP problem. In this paper we define a landmark counting heuristic for GP (that considers sub-goal information that is not explicitly represented in the planning instances), and a novel heuristic search algorithm for GP (that we call PGP) and that progressively processes subsets of the planning instances of a GP problem. Our two orthogonal contributions are analyzed in an ablation study, showing that both improve the state-of-the-art in GP as heuristic search, and that both benefit from each other when used in combination.
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