Dominance Pruning and Heuristics in Optimal Adversarial Non-Deterministic Planning

Abstract In many planning problems there are non-deterministic actions for which the outcome cannot be fully controlled by the planning agent. For critical tasks, we need to find a strategy that achieves the goal within a predictable time-frame and/or cost. Thus, we consider an adversarial planning setting and compute optimal policies that optimize the worst-case cost to reach the goal. In this work, we introduce domain-independent optimal heuristic search algorithms for this adversarial setting. To guide the search, we show how to leverage classical planning heuristics by applying single-outcome determinization. We also generalize dominance techniques, that analyse when a state is as good as another, to the non-deterministic setting and apply them to prune the search space. Our experimental analysis shows that both methods greatly help to compute optimal policies across multiple domains.