A unifying approach to heuristic search

The authors present the General Search Procedure (GSP) that provides a unifying way of describing search algorithms. The GSP captures both constructive and iterative search algorithms. The authors demonstrate as an exercise that various well-known heuristic search procedures can be obtained as instances of the GSP. The introduced formalism provides a solid ground to prove theoretical properties of search methods. Furthermore, by the formal approach the authors obtain a framework that can serve as the basis of implementing a search based problem solver.