State-Space Search: Algorithms, Complexity, Extensions, and Applications [Paperback]

This book is particularly concerned with heuristic state-space search for combinatorial optimization. Its two central themes are the average-case complexity of state-space search algorithms and the applications of the results notably to branch-and-bound techniques. Primarily written for researchers in computer science, the author presupposes a basic familiarity with complexity theory, and it is assumed that the reader is familiar with the basic concepts of random variables and recursive functions. Two successful applications are presented in depth: one is a set of state-space transformation methods which can be used to find approximate solutions quickly, and the second is forward estimation for constructing more informative evaluation functions.This book is about problem solving. Specifically, it is about heuristic state-space search under branch-and-bound framework for solving com? binatorial optimization problems. The two central themes of this book are the average-case complexity of heuristic state-space search algorithms based on branch-and-bound, and their applications to developing new problem-solving methods and algorithms. Heuristic state-space search is one of the fundamental problem-solving techniques in Computer Science and Operations Research, and usually constitutes an important component of most intelligent problem-solving systems. The search algorithms considered in this book can be classified into the category of branch-and-bound. Branch-and-bound is a general problem-solving paradigm, and is one of the best techniques for optimally solving computation-intensive problems, such as scheduling and planning. The main search algorithms considered include best-first search, depth? first branch-and-bound, iterative deepening, recursive best-first search, and space-bounded best-first search. Best-first search and depth-first branch-and-bound are very well known and have been used extensively in Computer Science and Operations Research. One important feature ló