The Merge-and-Shrink Planner : Bisimulation-based Abstraction for Optimal Planning

Merge-and-shrink abstraction is a general approach to heuristic design whose key advantage is its capability to make very fine-grained choices in defining abstractions. The Mergeand-shrink planner uses two different strategies for making these choices, both based on the well-known notion of bisimulation. The resulting heuristics are used in two sequential runs of A∗ search.