Beyond Cost-to-go Estimates in Situated Temporal Planning

Anonymous

Keywords: heuristic search, automated planning, temporal planning, real time search

TL;DR: Metareasoning in a Situated Temporal Planner

Abstract:

Heuristic search research often deals with finding algorithms for offline planning which aim to minimize the number of expanded nodes or planning time. In online planning, algorithms for real-time search or deadline-aware search have been considered before. However, in this paper, we are interested in the problem of {\em situated temporal planning} in which an agent's plan can depend on exogenous events in the external world, and thus it becomes important to take the passage of time into account during the planning process.
Previous work on situated temporal planning has proposed simple pruning strategies, as well as complex schemes for a simplified version of the associated metareasoning problem.
In this paper, we propose a simple metareasoning technique, called the crude greedy scheme, which can be applied in a situated temporal planner. Our empirical evaluation shows that the crude greedy scheme outperforms standard heuristic search based on cost-to-go estimates.