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How to install and run Fast Downward on Windows 10 from source with Visual Studio#

The following notes were contributed by Dan Schwartz in March 2025 and give more details than Fast Downward's build instructions. They were lightly edited and annotated with comments by us.

Please note that the instructions are not maintained and thus may be out of date by the time you are reading this. If you run into problems, please read the official build instructions.

Introduction#

This describes how I installed Fast Downward on my PC on March 21, 2025 and used it to run the Trucks examples in the classical-domains repository of entries into previous planning competitions.

Installing Dependencies#

You need to install the following software packages:

  1. Python: https://www.python.org/downloads/. For me the current version was Python 3.13.2, a file named python-3/13/2-amd64.exe.
  2. Visual Studio Community: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/. Clicking Download gives VisualStudioSetup.exe. Clicking this starts the installer. The window that appears has six optional Workloads. Check the one entitled "Desktop development with C++". Then click "Install" in the lower right corner. [This should also install CMake, so you do not need to install it seperately.]
  3. WinRaR: https://www.win-rar.com/. I got WinRAR-7.10.exe.

Getting the Source Code#

To get the current version of Fast Downward go to https://www.fast-downward.org/latest/. On this page, click on Releases on the left. Click on the latest release, which for me was Fast Downward 24.06. Get the source tarball, called fast-downward-24.06.1.tar.gz. I created a directory on my PC called 25-03-21_installation and put the file in that directory.

Right click this file and Windows will open a window the with option to Extract Here (using WinRaR). Do this. This creates a directory called fast-downward-24.06.1 containing the Fast Downward source code.

Building the Executable with the Developer Shell#

Next look for the Developer PowerShell for VS 2022 in your Windows start menu. I have the old Windows start menu (called StartIsBack), and this shows two items called "Visual Studio 2022", the first one being the Visual Studio program, and the second one being a directory containing a subdirectory called "Visual Studio Tools", which in turn contains the Developer PowerShell for VS 2022. Start up this PowerShell, navigate to your 25-03-31_installation/fast-downward-24-06-01 directory, and execute py build.py. This starts the build process, which took about 5 minutes on my PC. When this completes, Fast Downward is ready to run.

Running Fast Downward#

To experiment with Fast Downward, I downloaded the classical-domains repository from https://github.com/AI-Planning/classical-domains and copied the trucks collection into my fast-downward-24-06-01 directory. [We also host a set of benchmarks in Basel. In general, you do not have to copy the instance into the planner directory but can specify the path to the instance in your arguments.]

Then, following the instructions at https://www.fast-downward.org/PlannerUsage I opted to use the A* search algorithm with the blind heuristic. [Note that the blind heuristic is good for testing but there are probably better configurations for your problem.] This was applied by opening Windows PowerShell, navigating to the fast-downward-24-06-01 directory, and executing

./fast-downward.py trucks/domain.pddl trucks/p01.pddl --search "astar(blind())"

A window might pop up asking if you want to use Python. If so, click "Yes". This will generate the plan file sas_plan.