Award for research into cost-optimal planning
A team from the Artificial Intelligence Research Group at the University of Basel was honored with the Influential Paper Award 2024 at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS).
25 June 2024
The ICAPS annually honors research papers that have proven particularly influential over the last ten years. This year, the paper LP-Based Heuristics for Cost-Optimal Planning from 2014 by Dr. Florian Pommerening, Dr. Gabriele Röger, Prof. Malte Helmert from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Basel, and Prof. Blai Bonet from the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela received the award.
The prize committee's decision was based on the groundbreaking “pioneering techniques for heuristic search in cost-optimal planning problems” presented in the work. The authors introduced an innovative framework that allows for the combination of different heuristic families by representing them as linear programs, a method that has proven to enhance the efficiency of optimal planning algorithms and lead to new theoretical insights.
The approaches presented in this thesis have laid the foundation for a renewed interest in classical optimization techniques in action planning and have significantly improved the state of the art in this field.