University of Alberta RANDOM WALK PLANNING: THEORY, PRACTICE, AND APPLICATION

and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis, and except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatever without the author’s prior written permission. To my mother This thesis introduces random walk (RW) planning as a new search paradigm for satisficing planning by studying its theory, its practical relevance, and applications. We develop a theoretical framework that explains the strengths and weaknesses of random walks as a tool for heuristic search. Based on the theory, we propose a general framework for random walk search (RWS). We identify and experimentally study the key components of RWS and for each component, design and test practical and adaptive algorithms. We study resource-constrained planning as an application of RWS and show that the developed techniques implemented on top of RWS greatly outperform the state of th