The Complexity of Planning Revisited - A Parameterized Analysis
  The early classifications of the computational complexity of planning under
various restrictions in STRIPS (Bylander) and SAS+ (Baeckstroem and Nebel) have
influenced following research in planning in many ways. We go back and
reanalyse their subclasses, but this time using the more modern tool of
parameterized complexity analysis. This provides new results that together with
the old results give a more detailed picture of the complexity landscape. We
demonstrate separation results not possible with standard complexity theory,
which contributes to explaining why certain cases of planning have seemed
simpler in practice than theory has predicted. In particular, we show that
certain restrictions of practical interest are tractable in the parameterized
sense of the term, and that a simple heuristic is sufficient to make a
well-known partial-order planner exploit this fact.
