Title
Performance robustness of AI planners in the 2014 International Planning Competition.
Abstract
Solver competitions have been used in many areas of AI to assess the current state of the art and guide future research and development. AI planning is no exception, and the International Planning Competition (IPC) has been frequently run for nearly two decades. Due to the organisational and computational burden involved in running these competitions, solvers are generally compared using a single homogeneous hardware and software environment for all competitors. To what extent does the specific choice of hardware and software environment have an effect on solver performance, and is that effect distributed equally across the competing solvers? In this work, we use the competing planners and benchmark instance sets from the 2014 IPC to investigate these two questions. We recreate the 2014 IPC Optimal and Agile tracks on two distinct hardware environments and eight distinct software environments. We show that solver performance varies significantly based on the hardware and software environment, and that this variation is not equal for all planners. Furthermore, the observed variation is sufficient to change the competition rankings, including the top-ranked planners for some tracks.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.3233/AIC-170537
AI COMMUNICATIONS
Keywords
Field
DocType
Automated planning,domain-independent planners,international planning competition,algorithm performance robustness
Computer science,Robustness (computer science),Artificial intelligence
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
31
6
0921-7126
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.35
15
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Andrea F. Bocchese110.35
Chris Fawcett2665.36
Mauro Vallati321646.63
Alfonso Gerevini41424100.21
Holger H. Hoos55327308.70