Time-Bounded Best-First Search for Reversible and Non-reversible Search Graphs

Time-Bounded A* is a real-time, single-agent, deterministic search algorithm that expands states of a graph in the same order as A* does, but that unlike A* interleaves search and action execution. Known to outperform state-of-the-art real-time search algorithms based on Korf's Learning Real-Time A* (LRTA*) in some benchmarks, it has not been studied in detail and is sometimes not considered as a "true" real-time search algorithm since it fails in non-reversible problems even it the goal is still reachable from the current state. In this paper we propose and study Time-Bounded Best-First Search (TB(BFS)) a straightforward generalization of the time-bounded approach to any best-first search algorithm. Furthermore, we propose Restarting Time-Bounded Weighted A* (TBR (WA*)), an algorithm that deals more adequately with non-reversible search graphs, eliminating "backtracking moves" and incorporating search restarts and heuristic learning. In nonreversible problems we prove that TB(BFS) terminates and we deduce cost bounds for the solutions returned by Time-Bounded Weighted A* (TB(WA*)), an instance of TB(BFS). Furthermore, we prove TBR (WA*), under reasonable conditions, terminates. We evaluate TB(WA) in both grid pathfinding and the 15-puzzle. In addition, we evaluate TBR (WA*) on the racetrack problem. We compare our algorithms to LSS-LRTWA*, a variant of LRTA* that can exploit lookahead search and a weighted heuristic. A general observation is that the performance of both TB(WA*) and TBR (WA*) improves as the weight parameter is increased. In addition, our time-bounded algorithms almost always outperform LSS-LRTWA* by a significant margin.