Dynamic Potential Search — A New Bounded Suboptimal Search

Abstract

Potential Search (PS) is an algorithm that is designed to solve bounded cost search problems. In this paper, we modify PS to work within the framework of bounded suboptimal search and introduce Dynamic Potential Search (DPS). DPS uses the idea of PS but modifies the bound to be the product of the minimal f-value in OPEN and the required suboptimal bound. We study DPS and its attributes. We then experimentally compare DPS to WA* and to EES on a variety of domains and study parameters that affect the behavior of these algorithms.In general we show that in domains with unit edge costs (e.g., many standard benchmarks) DPS significantly outperforms WA* and EES but there are exceptions.