A Study of Procedural Search Control in Simon

The last few years have seen a proliferation of many planning systems, each of which boasts the ability to solve newer and more complex types of problems. However, the search space that results for these domains is directly proportional to the complexity of the domain. Although there has been some debate in the community ([7], [12]) it seems generally accepted that domain encodings are insufficient to allow the planner to perform an efficient search in all cases. In order to perform well across the board, planners must rely on search control heuristics that encode additional domain-specific knowledge.