A Reminder about the Importance of Computing and Exploiting Invariants in Planning

Abstract

Throughout the years, extensive work has pointed out how important computing and exploiting invariants is in planning. However, no recent studies about their empirical impact regarding their ability to simplify and/or complete the model have been done. In particular, an analysis about the impact of invariants computed in regression from the goals is severely lacking, despite the existence of previous attempts to use this kind of invariants in different planning settings. In this work we focus on the ability of invariants to simplify the planning task in a preprocessing step. Our results show that this simplification significantly improves the performance of different optimal and satisficing planners.