Heuristics for Domain-Independent Planning: A Survey

Increasing interest has been devoted to Planning as Heuristic Search over the years. Intense research has focused on deriving fast and accurate heuristics for domain-independent planning. This paper reports on an extensive survey and analysis of research work related to heuristic derivation techniques for state space search. Survey results reveal that heuristic techniques have been extensively applied in many efficient planners and result in impressive performances. We extend the survey analysis to suggest promising avenues for future research in heuristic derivation and heuristic search techniques.