Advanced Factoring Strategies for Decoupled Search Using Linear Programming

Abstract

Star-topology decoupled state space search decomposes a planning task and searches over the component state spaces instead of multiplying the state variables. This can lead to an exponential reduction of the search effort. To do so, in a preprocess before the search, the given planning task is partitioned into factors, such that the interaction between these factors takes the form of a star topology. Prior work has identified several ways to automatically decompose planning tasks, however, was not able to release the full potential of decoupled search. We try to close this gap by introducing an integer linear programming formulation of the factoring process, allowing us to explicitly specify the properties that a factoring should have. We prove that our approach returns the factoring that maximizes the number of factors, if this is the objective, and employ two other properties to assess the quality of a factoring. Our experimental evaluation shows that this leads to superior performance and substantially increases the applicability of decoupled search.