Investigating domain independent heuristics in a timeline-based planner

Taking inspiration from both Constraint Programming (CP) and Logic Programming (LP), the iLoC domain-independent planning system is a timeline-based planner that allows to model both planning and scheduling problems according to a uniform schema. This paper presents a complete description of the planner and describes two domain independent heuristics aiming at improving the planner ability to solve classical planning problems. An experimental evaluation demonstrates the iLoC strength in solving temporally expressive problems and its improved ability to address the causal reasoning capability which is a dominant feature of classical planning. Furthermore the experimentation produces some observations for new directions to synthesize effective general purpose solving abilities.