Enhancing the Context-Enhanced Additive Heuristic with Precedence Constraints

Recently, Helmert and Geffner proposed the context-enhanced additive heuristic, where fact costs are evaluated relative to context states that arise from achieving first a pivot condition of each operator. As Helmert and Geffner pointed out, the method can be generalized to consider contexts arising from arbitrary precedence constraints over operator conditions instead. Herein, we provide such a generalization. We extend Helmert and Geffner’s equations, and discuss a number of design choices that arise. Drawing on previous work on goal orderings, we design a family of methods for automatically generating precedence constraints. We run largescale experiments, showing that the technique can help significantly, depending on the choice of precedence constraints. We shed some light on this by profiling the behavior of all possible precedence constraints, using a sampling technique.