Stratified tree search: a novel suboptimal heuristic search algorithm

Traditional heuristic search algorithms use the ranking of states that a heuristic function provides to guide the search. In this paper—with the objective of improving suboptimality and runtime of search algorithms when only weak heuristics are available—we present Stratified Tree Search (STS), a suboptimal heuristic search algorithm that uses a heuristic to partition the state space to guide the search. We call this partition a type system. STS assumes that nodes of the same type will lead to solutions of the same cost. Thus, STS expands only one node of each type in every level of search. We show that in general STS offers a good tradeoff between solution quality and search speed by varying the size of the type system. However, in some cases, STS might not provide a fine adjustment of this tradeoff. We present a variant of STS, Beam STS (BSTS), that allows one to make fine adjustments of this tradeoff. BSTS combines the ideas of STS with those of Beam Search. Our empirical results in benchmark domains show that both STS and BSTS can find solutions of lower suboptimality in less time than standard heuristic search algorithms for finding suboptimal solutions.