The 3rd international planning competition: results and analysis

TLDR: The paper addresses the questions of comparative performance between planners, comparative difficulty of domains, the degree of agreement between planners about the relative difficulty of individual problem instances and the question of how well planners scale relative to one another over increasingly difficult problems through statistical analysis of the raw results.

Abstract: This paper reports the outcome of the third in the series of biennial international planning competitions, held in association with the International Conference on AI Planning and Scheduling (AIPS) in 2002. In addition to describing the domains, the planners and the objectives of the competition, the paper includes analysis of the results. The results are analysed from several perspectives, in order to address the questions of comparative performance between planners, comparative difficulty of domains, the degree of agreement between planners about the relative difficulty of individual problem instances and the question of how well planners scale relative to one another over increasingly difficult problems. The paper addresses these questions through statistical analysis of the raw results of the competition, in order to determine which results can be considered to be adequately supported by the data. The paper concludes with a discussion of some challenges for the future of the competition series.