Hipster: An Open Source Java Library for Heuristic Search

In this paper we present Hipster: a free, open source Java library for heuristic search algorithms. The motivation of developing Hipster is the lack of standard Java search libraries with an extensible, flexible, simple to use model. Moreover, most of the libraries for search algorithms rely on recursive implementations which do not offer fine-grained control over the algorithm. Hipster provides a wide variety of classical search algorithms implemented in an iterative way like Dijkstra, A*, IDA*, AD* and more. In order to facilitate the use and integration with most research, commercial and non-commercial projects, the software is developed under the open source Apache 2.0 License. Hipster was successfully applied in two different research projects in the areas of Web service composition and motion planning. Source code, documentation, binaries and examples can be found at https://github.com/citiususc/hipster.

keywords: heuristic search, uninformed search, informed search, local search, java library