Heuristic Search

Stefan Edelkamp is senior researcher and lecturer at University Bremen, where he heads projects on intrusion detection, on model checking and on planning for general game playing. He received an M.S. degree from the University Dortmund for his Master’s thesis on "Weak Heapsort", and a Ph.d. degree from the University of Freiburg for his dissertation on "Data Structures and Learning Algorithms in State Space Search". Later on, he obtained a postdoctoral lecture qualification (Venia Legendi) for his habilitation on "Heuristic Search". His planning systems won various first and second performance awards at International Planning Competitions. Stefan Edelkamp has published extensively on search, serves as member on program committees (including recent editions of SARA, SOCS, ICAPS, ECAI, IJCAI, and AAAI) and on steering committees (including SPIN and MOCHART). He is member of the editorial board of JAIR and organizes international workshops, tutorials, and seminars in his area of expertise. In 2011 he will co-chair the ICAPS Conference as well as the German Conference on AI. Stefan Schroedl is a researcher and software developer in the areas of artifical intelligence and machine learning. He worked as a freelance software developer for different companies in Germany and Switzerland, among others, designing and realizing a route finding systems for a leading commercial product in Switzerland. At DaimlerChrylser Research, he continued to work on automated generation and search of route maps based on global positioning traces. Stefan Schroedl later joined Yahoo! Labs to develop auction algorithms, relevance prediction and user personalization systems for web search advertising. In his current position at A9.com, he strives to improve Amazon.com's product search using machine-learned ranking models. He has published on route finding algorithms, memory-limited and external-memory search, as well as on search for solving DNA sequence alignment problems. Stefan Schroedl hold a Ph.D. for his dissertation "Negation as Failure in Explanation- Based Generalization", and a M.S degree for his thesis "Coupling Numerical and Symbolic Methods in the Analysis of Neurophysiological Experiments".

"Heuristic Search is a very solid monograph and textbook on (not only heuristic) search. In its presentation it is always more formal than colloquial, it is precise and well structured. Due to its spiral approach it motivates reading it in its entirety." --Zentralblatt MATH 2012"The authors have done an outstanding job putting together this book on artificial intelligence (AI) heuristic state space search. It comprehensively covers the subject from its basics to the most recent work and is a great introduction for beginners in this field." --BCS.org"Heuristic search lies at the core of Artificial Intelligence and it provides the foundations for many different approaches in problem solving. This book provides a comprehensive yet deep description of the main algorithms in the field along with a very complete discussion of their main applications. Very well-written, it embellishes every algorithm with pseudo-code and technical studies of their theoretical performance." --Carlos Linares López, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid"This is an introduction to artificial intelligence heuristic state space search. Authors Edelkamp (U. of Bremen, Germany) and Schrödl (a research scientist at Yahoo! Labs) seek to strike a balance between search algorithms and their theoretical analysis, on the one hand, and their efficient implementation and application to important real-world problems on the other, while covering the field comprehensively from well-known basic results to recent work in the state of the art. Prior knowledge of artificial intelligence is not assumed, but basic knowledge of algorithms, data structures, and calculus is expected. Proofs are included for formal rigor and to introduce proof techniques to the reader. They have organized the material into five sections: heuristic search primer, heuristic search under memory constraints, heuristic search under time constraints, heuristic search variants, and applications." --SciTech Book News"This almost encyclopedic text is suitable for advanced courses in artificial intelligence and as a text and reference for developers, practitioners, students, and researchers in artificial intelligence, robotics, computational biology, and the decision sciences. The exposition is comparable to texts for a graduate-level or advanced undergraduate course in computer science, and prior exposure or coursework in advanced algorithms, computability, or artificial intelligence would help a great deal in understanding the material. Algorithms are described in pseudocode, accompanied by diagrams and narrative explanations in the text. The vast size of the ‘search algorithms’ subject domain and the variety of applications of search mean that much information--especially pertaining to applications of search algorithms--had to be left out; however, an extensive (though still limited) bibliography is included for follow-up by the reader. Exercises are provided for each chapter, except the five chapters on applications, and bibliographic notes accompany all chapters." --Computing Reviews

• PART I Heuristic Search Primer Chapter 1 IntroductionChapter 2 Basic Search Algorithms Chapter 3 Dictionary Data Structures Chapter 4 Automatically Created HeuristicsPART II Heuristic Search under Memory ConstraintsChapter 5 Linear-Space SearchChapter 6 Memory Restricted Search Chapter 7 Symbolic Search Chapter 8 External Search PART III Heuristic Search under Time Constraints Chapter 9 Distributed Search Chapter 10 State Space PruningChapter 11 Real-Time Search by Sven Koenig PART IV Heuristic Search Variants Chapter 12 Adversary Search Chapter 13 Constraint Search Chapter 14 Selective SearchPART V Heurstic Search ApplicationsChapter 15 Action Planning Chapter 16 Automated System Verification Chapter 17 Vehicle Navigation Chapter 18 Computational Biology Chapter 19 Robotics by Sven Koenig