Granularity in Multi-Method Planning

Abstract

Multi-method planning is an approach to using a set of different planning methods to simultaneously achieve planner completeness, planning time efficiency, and plan length reduction. Although it has been shown that coordinating a set of methods in a coarse-grained, problem-by-problem manner has the potential for approaching this ideal, such an approach can waste a significant amount of time in trying methods that ultimately prove inadequate. This paper investigates an approach to reducing this wasted effort by refining the granularity at which methods are switched. The experimental results show that the fine-grained approach can improve the planning time significantly compared with coarse-grained and single-method approaches.