Automatic Instance Generation for Classical Planning

The benchmarks from previous International Planning Competitions (IPCs) are the de-facto standard for evaluating planning algorithms. The IPC set is both a collection of planning domains and a selection of instances from these domains. Most of the domains come with a parameterized generator that generates new instances for a given set of parameter values. Due to the steady progress of planning research some of the instances that were generated for past IPCs are inadequate for evaluating current planners. To alleviate this problem, we introduce Autoscale, an automatic tool that selects instances for a given domain. Autoscale takes into account constraints from the domain designer as well as the performance of current planners to generate an instance set of appropriate difficulty, while avoiding too much bias with respect to the considered planners. We show that the resulting benchmark set is superior to the IPC set and has the potential of improving empirical evaluation of planning research.