Workshop on

International Planning Competition: Past, Present and Future

September 23, 2007

Location: Barus and Holley Hall: BH159 (map)

Workshop Program is now Available

Held in conjunction with

ICAPS'07

17th International Conference on Automated Planning & Scheduling

September 22-26, 2007

Providence, Rhode Island, USA

Overview:

The International Planning Competition (IPC) started in 1998. It was created to set the common ground for comparison between different planning techniques tackling different planning problems. For this purpose, it has been a success in shaping up the standard planning language (PDDL), identifying important extensions, gathering a set of benchmarks for different planning problems, and providing tools for building and evaluating planners. In the passing of the years several critiques have been raised concerning the necessity and the usefulness of several aspects of the competition. This workshop aims at reviewing the current status of the international planning competition and in particular its deterministic track (although we accept positions concerning the non-deterministic track), and determine/sketch/prepare the forthcoming event (6th IPC).

Topics:

We seek submissions of contributed work in answering the many challenging questions that are summarized in the following topics. Submissions on related topics are also welcome.

• Language: Review of PDDL 3, assessment, comparison with other modeling languages and proposals for possible extensions.
• Domains: Review of current domains, wrt their difficulty/complexity, closeness to real-world applications, critic/review on the hardness of different domains and whether or not the current problem sets are adequate in representing the technical challenges in different classes. Proposal for new domains, particularly ones that can capture most critical constraints in some real-world applications as well as discussion on applications for which planning is suitable.
• Existing Tracks: Review of the existing tracks, in particular what worked, what did not, and what needs to be changed/improved in each track.
• Learning Track: Develop plans for the new learning track of the competition.
• Proposed Tracks: Review proposals for new competition tracks.
• Evaluation Criteria: Review/critic on the current evaluation approach and proposals for changes/standardization. Whether or not a single objective function is adequate to compare different planners in different tracks, or a multi-objective function is needed. Effective ways to compare fully automated planners, planners with learned or hand-crafted control knowledge.
• Planners: Review of the performance of various types of planners (e.g. model checking, satisfiability, state-space heuristic, local search etc) in the past competitions, possibly wrt various types of domains. Identifying problem structures that are suitable for different types of planner and why.
• Review of the evolution of planners and planning techniques throughout the competition history. What kind of planner do we seek?

Length of Paper:

Authors have the options to submit either a full paper or a short position papers. Full papers will be 10 pages length max, whereas short ones will be 4 pages length max. All papers will be judged by at-least two reviewers and peer-reviewed and all accepted papers will be included in the workshop notes.

We are particularly interested in "opinion" papers about what worked and did not worked in the previous IPCs as well as the important issues in potential promising applications of planning that have not been addressed in the IPC.

Paper Submissions:

Authors are encouraged to submit papers electronically in PDF format. Papers must be formatted using the AAAI style template (http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php) and must not exceed 10 pages in length.

Please send submissions by e-mail to:

• If the topic of the paper is related to planning & learning: afern@eecs.oregonstate.edu
• All other topics: helmert@informatik.uni-freiburg.de

Important Dates:

• Paper Submission Deadline: June 30th, 2007 (Extended)
• Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: July 13, 2007
• Camera-ready Copy Due Date: July 27, 2007
• Workshop Date: September 23, 2007

Format of the Workshop:

The workshop will span over a full day and will consist of:

• One or two invited talks (1 hour) from people that have been involved in the past competitions.
• Several full presentations (30 mins including discussion).
• Several short presentations (15 mins including discussion).

We intend to give emphasis to the discussion rather to the presentations. So, we plan to devote the 1/3 of the time (i.e. 20 out of 60 mins for invited talks, 10 out of 30 mins for full presentations and 5 out of 15 mins for short presentations) to questions/open discussion around the talk.

Moreover we plan to organize the presentations in sessions with specific topics (e.g. language, learning track, domains, evaluation), and at the end of each session to have some time for general discussion on the topic (possibly through some short panel discussion). Of course the specific type and length of sessions will be determined after reviewing the submitted papers.

Organizing Committee:

• Minh Do, Palo Alto Research Center, USA
• Alan Fern, Oregon State University, USA
• Malte Helmert, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg, Germany
• Ioannis Refanidis, University of Macedonia, Greece

Program Committee:

• Blai Bonet, Universidad Simón Bolívar Caracas, Venezuela
• Hector Geffner, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
• Alfonso Gerevini, Università degli Studi di Brescia, Italy
• Patrik Haslum, National ICT Australia, Australia
• Jörg Hoffmann, University of Innsbruck, Austria
• Subbarao Kambhampati, Arizona State University, USA
• Henry Kautz, University of Rochester, USA
• Derek Long, University of Strathclyde, UK
• Alessandro Saetti, Università degli Studi di Brescia, Italy
• David Smith, NASA Ames Research Center, USA
• Sylvie Thiebaux, Australian National University, Australia