Sorting Sequential Portfolios in Automated Planning

Abstract

Recent work in portfolios of problem solvers has shown their ability to outperform single-algorithm approaches in some tasks (e.g. SAT or Automated Planning). However, not much work has been devoted to a better understanding of the relationship between the order of the component solvers and the performance of the resulting portfolio over time. We propose to sort the component solvers in a sequential portfolio, such that the resulting ordered portfolio maximizes the probability of providing the largest performance at any point in time. We empirically show that our greedy approach efficiently obtains near-optimal performance over time. Also, it generalizes much better than an optimal approach which has been observed to suffer from overfitting.