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Obtaining and running Fast Downward
This page is intended for people who are not core developers of the planner and want to use it in their own research, for example in order to:
- conduct experiments that compare other systems against Fast Downward
- implement their own search algorithms or heuristics by building on the Fast Downward code
Since we don't currently consider the code to be in releasable shape, there is no "official" code distribution of the planner available at the moment. We can still give you access to the planner, but it's important that you be aware of some issues with the current codebase.
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Note on running LAMA: As of this writing, most parts of LAMA have been (re-)integrated into the Fast Downward codebase, but there are still some important features and optimizations missing. If the reason why you want to access the Fast Downward code is because you want to run experiments that compare against the LAMA planner, we strongly recommend downloading the older, but more stable LAMA distribution from Silvia Richter's homepage instead.
Getting access to the planner
The code is currently being developed in a Subversion repository. If you haven't used Subversion before, you may want to have a look at the excellent documentation available online. However, you don't really have to understand Subversion to use the planner, unless you also want to use our repository for your development efforts (see below).
To get access to the planner, send me an email <helmert@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>. I will then add you to the list of people with access to the Subversion repository that hosts the code, and you will receive an automated email with instructions on how to check out the code. That email assumes that you're using a Unix-ish system (Linux is your best bet), which you will need anyway to compile and run the planner.
The email will tell you to check out the code using the command
svn checkout svn+ssh://downward DIRNAME
or something similar, which is not a good command to use since it will check out all the (many) branches of the code, with multiple copies of the benchmark suite etc. Instead, I recommend you use the command
svn checkout svn+ssh://downward/trunk DIRNAME
to only check out the trunk version of the code (i.e., the main line of current development).