Target-Value Search Revisited (Extended Abstract)

This paper addresses the Target-Value Search (TVS) problem, which is the problem of finding a path between two nodes in a graph whose cost is as close as possible to a given target value T. This problem has been previously addressed only for directed acyclic graphs. In this work we develop the theory required to solve this problem optimally for any type of graphs. We modify traditional heuristic search algorithms for this setting, and propose a novel bidirectional search algorithm that is specifically suited for TVS. The benefits of this bidirectional search algorithm are discussed both theoretically and experimentally on several domains. A longer version of this work was accepted to IJCAI-2013 (Linares Lopez et al. 2013)