Portfolio-based Planning: State of the Art, Common Practice and Open Challenges

In recent years the field of automated planning 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 perform
better 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 us suppose that future challenges of the
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.