  There has been evidence that least-commitment planners can efficiently handle
planning problems that involve difficult goal interactions. This evidence has
led to the common belief that delayed-commitment is the "best" possible
planning strategy. However, we recently found evidence that eager-commitment
planners can handle a variety of planning problems more efficiently, in
particular those with difficult operator choices. Resigned to the futility of
trying to find a universally successful planning strategy, we devised a planner
that can be used to study which domains and problems are best for which
planning strategies. In this article we introduce this new planning algorithm,
FLECS, which uses a FLExible Commitment Strategy with respect to plan-step
orderings. It is able to use any strategy from delayed-commitment to
eager-commitment. The combination of delayed and eager operator-ordering
commitments allows FLECS to take advantage of the benefits of explicitly using
a simulated execution state and reasoning about planning constraints. FLECS can
vary its commitment strategy across different problems and domains, and also
during the course of a single planning problem. FLECS represents a novel
contribution to planning in that it explicitly provides the choice of which
commitment strategy to use while planning. FLECS provides a framework to
investigate the mapping from planning domains and problems to efficient
planning strategies.
