Incremental Learning of Control Knowledge for Improvement of Planning Efficiency and Plan Quality

General-purpose planners use domain-independent search heuristics to generate solutions for problems in a variety of different domains. However, as heuristics they are, there are situations in which these heuristics do not produce the expected effective guidance, and the planner performs inefficiently or obtains solutions of poor quality. Learning from experience can help to identify the particular situations for which the domain-independent heuristics need to be overridden. In this paper, we present a system, HAMLET, that learns control knowledge and incrementally refines it, allowing the planner not only to solve efficiently complex problems, but also generate solutions of good quality. We claim that incremental learning of control knowledge and consideration of the quality of the solutions are two fundamental research directions towards the goal of applying planning techniques to real-world problems. We show empirical results in a complex domain that show the promise of our approach to support our claims.

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