Planning Through Stochastic Local Search and Temporal Action Graphs in
  LPG
  We present some techniques for planning in domains specified with the recent
standard language PDDL2.1, supporting 'durative actions' and numerical
quantities. These techniques are implemented in LPG, a domain-independent
planner that took part in the 3rd International Planning Competition (IPC). LPG
is an incremental, any time system producing multi-criteria quality plans. The
core of the system is based on a stochastic local search method and on a
graph-based representation called 'Temporal Action Graphs' (TA-graphs). This
paper focuses on temporal planning, introducing TA-graphs and proposing some
techniques to guide the search in LPG using this representation. The
experimental results of the 3rd IPC, as well as further results presented in
this paper, show that our techniques can be very effective. Often LPG
outperforms all other fully-automated planners of the 3rd IPC in terms of speed
to derive a solution, or quality of the solutions that can be produced.
