Arvandherd: Parallel Planning With A Portfolio

ArvandHerd is a parallel planner that won the multi-core sequential satisficing track of the 2011 International Planning Competition (IPC 2011). It assigns processors to run different members of an algorithm portfolio which contains several configurations of each of two different planners: LAMA-2008 and Arvand. In this paper, we demonstrate that simple techniques for using different planner configurations can significantly improve the coverage of both of these planners. We then show that these two planners, when using multiple configurations, can be combined to construct a high performance parallel planner. In particular, we will show that ArvandHerd can solve more IPC benchmark problems than even a perfect parallelization of LAMA-2011, which won the satisficing track at IPC 2011. We will also show that the coverage of ArvandHerd can be further improved if LAMA-2008 is replaced by LAMA-2011 in the portfolio.