Abstract:
The PYRRHUS planning system is a decision-theoretic extension to POCL planners that finds optimal plans for a class of goal-directed value functions. Although PYRRHUS uses a branch-and-bound algorithm instead of best-first satisficing search, it is faced with the same flaw selection decision as other POCL planners. This paper explains why popular domain-independent flaw-selection strategies are ineffective within an optimizing framework, and presents two new strategies that exploit the additional value information available to PYRRHUS.