Planning as search: A quantitative approach

We present the thesis that planning can be viewed as problem-solving search using subgoals, macro-operators, and abstraction as knowledge sources. Our goal is to quantify problem-solving performance using these sources of knowledge. New results include the identification of subgoal distance as a fundamental measure of problem difficulty, a multiplicative time-space tradeoff for macro-operators, and an analysis of abstraction which concludes that abstraction hierarchies can reduce exponential problems to linear complexity. Artificial Intelligence, 33 (1), 65-88.