Abstract:This paper improves the methods of observation reduction in non-deterministic planning (NDP) in three aspects: in finding MOS (minimal observation set); in finding out the optimal observation set (OOS) when observations have different costs; and in finding fault-tolerant OOS. A MOS problem is similar to a minimal set cover (MSC) problem, so it can be proved that finding MOS is NP-hard. Inspired by MSC methods, an O(2mm2) but Ω(2m?1) algorithm for MOS is presented, where m is the number of observations. By using integer programming (IP) technologies, OOS or fault tolerant OOS can be found out. Proofs are provided to show that these algorithms can guarantee finding optimal solutions.