A Guide to Portfolio-based Planning

In the recent years the field of automated planing has significantly advanced and several powerful domain-independent planners have been developed. However, none of these systems clearly outperforms all the others in every known
benchmark domain. This observation motivated the idea of configuring and exploiting a portfolio of planners to achieve better performances than any individual planner: some recent planning systems based on this idea achieved significantly
good results in experimental analysis and International Planning Competitions. Such results let suppose that future challenges of Automated Planning community will converge on designing different approaches for combining existing planning algorithms.
This paper reviews existing techniques and provides an exhaustive guide to portfolio-
based planning. In addition, the paper outlines open issues of existing approaches and highlights possible future evolution of these techniques.