Planning as satisfiability: Heuristics

Reduction to SAT is a very successful approach to solving hard combinatorial problems in Artificial Intelligence and computer science in general. Most commonly, problem instances reduced to SAT are solved with a general-purpose SAT solver. Although there is the obvious possibility of improving the SAT solving process with application-specific heuristics, this has rarely been done successfully. In this work we propose a planning-specific variable selection strategy for SAT solving. The strategy is based on generic principles about properties of plans, and its performance with standard planning benchmarks often substantially improves on generic variable selection heuristics, such as VSIDS, and often lifts it to the same level with other search methods such as explicit state-space search with heuristic search algorithms.

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