A Look-Ahead B&B Search for Cost-Based Planning

This paper focuses on heuristic cost-based planning. We propose a combination of a heuristic designed to deal with this planning model together with the usage of look-ahead states based on relaxed plans to speed-up the search. The search algorithm is a modified Best-First Search (BFS) performing Branch and Bound (B&B) to improve the last solution found. The objective of the work is to obtain a good balance between the quality of the plans and the search time. The experiments show that the combination is effective in most of the evaluated domains.