Heuristic planning: A declarative approach based on strategies for action selection

This paper introduces the notion of heuristic planning, and describes a particular approach to heuristic planning based on a declarative formalization of strategies for action selection. This approach is compared with some heuristic planning systems proposed in the literature. The heuristic information and declarative formalisms for the representation of heuristic knowledge used by these systems are compared in terms of their capacity of controlling the search process and their effectiveness for solving some planning problems. Finally, the results of some experiments on heuristic answer set planning are described in order to show how heuristics can be used to improve the scalability of answer set planning.