Planning by Rewriting
  Domain-independent planning is a hard combinatorial problem. Taking into
account plan quality makes the task even more difficult. This article
introduces Planning by Rewriting (PbR), a new paradigm for efficient
high-quality domain-independent planning. PbR exploits declarative
plan-rewriting rules and efficient local search techniques to transform an
easy-to-generate, but possibly suboptimal, initial plan into a high-quality
plan. In addition to addressing the issues of planning efficiency and plan
quality, this framework offers a new anytime planning algorithm. We have
implemented this planner and applied it to several existing domains. The
experimental results show that the PbR approach provides significant savings in
planning effort while generating high-quality plans.
