Cost-Partitioned Merge-and-Shrink Heuristics for Optimal Classical Planning

Cost partitioning is a method for admissibly combining admissible heuristics. In this work, we extend this concept to merge-and-shrink (M&S) abstractions that may use labels that do not directly correspond to operators. We investigate how optimal and saturated cost partitioning (SCP) interact with M&S transformations and develop a method to compute SCPs during the computation of M&S. Experiments show that SCP significantly improves M&S on standard planning benchmarks.