Ariel Felner

We examine two policies for reopening of nodes: never reopen (NR) and always reopen (AR). While there are circumstances where each policy is beneficial, we observed empirically that NR is usually faster. However, NR may fail to return a solution of the desired quality in two scenarios: (1) in a bounded suboptimal search when inconsistent heuristics are used and (2) in a bounded cost setting. To remedy this we provide two repair policies for NR when the desired quality was not obtained. The first policy is to restart AR. The second policy is to repeatedly place the nodes that were not reopened back in OPEN and continue with NR. Experimental results show that both repair polices outperform the AR policy.