Abstraction can be an effective technique for dealing with
the complexity of planning tasks. This paper is aimed at assessing and
identifying in which cases abstraction can actually speed-up the overall
search. In fact, it is well known that the impact of abstraction on the
time spent to search for a solution of a planning problem can be positive
or negative, depending on several factors -including the number of objects
defined in the domain, the branching factor, and the plan length.
Experimental results highlight the role of such aspects on the overall performance
of an algorithm that performs the search at the ground-level
only, and compares them with the ones obtained by enforcing abstraction
