Compared to optimal planners, satisficing planners can solve much harder problems but may produce overly costly and long plans. Plan quality for satisficing planners has become increasingly important. The most recent planning competition IPC-2008 used the cost of the best known plan divided by the cost of the generated plan as an evaluation metric. This paper proposes and evaluates two simple but effective methods for plan improvement: Action Elimination improves an existing plan by repeatedly removing sets of irrelevant actions. Plan Neighborhood Graph Search finds a new, shorter plan by creating a plan neighborhood graph PNG(π) of a given plan π, and then extracts a shortest path from PNG(π). Both methods are implemented in the Aras postprocessor and are empirically shown to improve the result of several planners, including the top four planners from IPC-2008, under competition conditions.

Search methods based on Monte-Carlo simulation have recently led to breakthrough performance improvements in difficult game-playing domains such as Go and General Game Playing. Monte-Carlo Random Walk (MRW) planning applies Monte-Carlo ideas to deterministic classical planning. In the forward chaining planner Arvand, Monte-Carlo random walks are used to explore the local neighborhood of a search state for action selection. In contrast to the stochastic local search approach used in the recent planner Identidem, random walks yield a larger and unbiased sample of the search neighborhood, and require state evaluations only at the endpoints of each walk. On IPC-4 competition problems, the performance of Arvand is competitive with state of the art systems.