Using Monte Carlo Tree Search to Solve Planning Problems in Transportation Domains

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) techniques brought fresh breeze to the area of computer games where they significantly improved solving algorithms for games such as Go. MCTS also worked well when solving a real-life planning problem of the Petrobras company brought by the Fourth International Competition on Knowledge Engineering Techniques for Planning and Scheduling. In this paper we generalize the ideas of using MCTS techniques in planning, in particular for transportation problems. We highlight the difficulties of applying MCTS in planning, we show possible approaches to overcome these difficulties, and we propose a particular method for solving transportation problems.

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