Compressed Path Databases with Ordered Wildcard Substitutions

Compressed path databases (CPDs) are a state-of-the-art approach to path planning, a core AI problem. In the Grid-based Path Planning Competition, the CPD-based SRC path planning system was the fastest competitor with respect to both computing full optimal paths and computing the first moves of an optimal path. However, on large maps, CPDs can require a significant amount of memory, which can be a serious practical bottleneck. We present an approach that significantly reduces the size of a CPD. Our approach replaces part of the data encoded in a CPD with wildcards ("don’t care" symbols), maintaining the ability to compute optimal paths for all pairs of nodes of an undirected graph. We show that using wildcards in a way that maximizes the memory savings is NP-hard. We consider heuristics that achieve a good performance in practice. We implement our ideas on top of SRC and provide a detailed empirical analysis. Average memory savings can reach a factor of 2. Our first-k-moves lag (i.e., the time before knowing the first k optimal forward moves) increases, but it can be kept within competitive values. The speed of computing full optimal paths improves slightly