Automatic Generation of Efficient Domain-Specific Planners from Generic Parametrized Planners

When designing state-of-the-art, domain-independent planning systems, many decisions have to be made with respect to the domain analysis or compilation performed during preprocessing, the heuristic functions used during search, and other features of the search algorithm. These design decisions can have a large impact on the performance of the resulting planner. By providing many alternatives for these choices and exposing them as parameters, planning systems can in principle be configured to work well on different domains. However, planners are typically used in default configurations that have been chosen because of their good average performance over a set of benchmark domains, with limited experimentation over the potentially huge range of possible configurations. In this work, we propose a general framework for automatically configuring a parameterized planner, and show that substantial performance gains can be achieved. We apply the framework to the well-known LPG planner, which in the context of this work was expanded to 62 parameters and over 6.5 x 10^17 possible configurations. By using this highly parameterized planning system in combination with the state-of-the-art automatic algorithm configuration procedure ParamILS, excellent performance on a broad range of well-known benchmark domains was achieved, as also witnessed by the results of the learning track of the 7th International Planning Competition.