Patent ID: 8266092

Claim:
A method for identifying at least one path having a value closest to a target value, the method comprising: providing a starting graph with a plurality of nodes and a plurality of edges between pairs of nodes, each edge having at least one positive directional weight value, the nodes individually comprising at least one property value and representing a physical location or an operational state of a machine or system; constructing a successor graph based at least partially on the starting graph and a start node; constructing a predecessor graph based at least partially on the starting graph and at least one goal node; constructing a connection graph based at least partially on the successor and predecessor graphs; determining upper and lower bound values for each given node of the connection graph based at least partially on the weight values of all remaining paths from the given node to the at least one goal node; and performing a best first search using the upper and lower bound values to identify at least one path from the start node to the goal node having a path value closest to a non-zero target value.