Moving Planning and Scheduling Systems into the Real World

 Overview 

 Scope 

 Format 

 Submissions 

 Important Dates 

 Schedule 

 Organisation 

The successor of this workshop was the SPARK'08 workshop at ICAPS'08.

Overview

The intent of this workshop is to bring together researchers who are working on or interested in real-world planning and scheduling systems, along with those who can bring expertise from outside of the planning and scheduling community relevant to the successful development and deployment of real-world systems. The workshop is designed to be a forum for topics beyond the theoretical or even practical modeling of planning and scheduling problems and the development of algorithms to solve them, important as these ongoing efforts are. The goals of this workshop are to stimulate broader thinking within the planning and scheduling community about the factors that play significant roles in applications, and to foster an exchange of ideas, approaches, and experiences that will improve the community's ability to transition its research to important problem domains.

The workshop solicits papers in two general areas. The first is reporting on planning and scheduling applications that have been or are being developed to address problems of practical import. These submissions need not encompass complete solutions, but must clearly target some significant portion of a real-world problem. The second area is technical work that, although perhaps not linked to a specific application, has been pursued with an eye toward enabling practical applications in the future. To achieve critical mass for certain key topics, the workshop particularly encourages papers in the areas of mixed-initiative problem solving, knowledge acquisition, and verification and validation.

Download the Call for Papers.

Why Now?

Planning and scheduling technologies have matured significantly in recent years, making it possible for them to start to be deployed in application areas such as logistics planning, workflow systems, space mission planning, entertainment, and the military. Some of these early deployments have shown that, while automated planning and scheduling technologies have an important role to play, applications demand much more than efficient algorithms. To build on these initial successes, the community must both understand better the requirements inherent to deploying planning and scheduling systems, and work to develop solutions for them.

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Scope

We explicitly encourage contributions from both scheduling and planning backgrounds, as well as from those outside the traditional ICAPS community who can contribute to the themes of the workshop. Relevant topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Lessons learned in building or deploying planning and scheduling applications
• System design -- principles, methodologies, strategies
• Tool support environments
• Interoperability and integration
• Mixed-initiative problem solving
• Knowledge acquisition
• Verification and validation of domain models and software for planning and scheduling
• Adjustable autonomy
• Integrated planning, scheduling, and execution
• Representation and reasoning -- practical trade-offs
• Learning for customization and performance improvement
• UI design for planning and scheduling systems
• Visualization and explanation of plans and schedules
• Robustness to uncertainty and execution failures
• Evaluation and validation

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Format

The workshop will span a full day. The program will start with an invited talk by a member of the community (tba) with substantial experience in developing planning and scheduling applications, with the objective of emphasizing important lessons that he or she has learned in that work. The middle of the day will focus on paper presentations, split roughly equally among 'lessons learned' and 'enabling technologies'. The program will conclude with a discussion session for all workshop participants that will address key technical and procedural aspects of developing planning and scheduling applications.

This workshop is aligned with and complementary to the related ICAPS'07 workshop on Planning and Plan Execution for Real-World Systems. Our workshop broadly considers applications of planning and scheduling technologies along with critical enabling technologies, while the other workshop focuses on execution-time issues for real-world planning problems.

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Submission Information

Submissions may be regular papers (preferably 6 pages, although consideration will be given to papers of up to 8 pages) or short position papers (at most 2 pages). All papers should conform to the AAAI style template. Submissions will be reviewed by at least two referees.

Interested contributers are invited to communicate their intent to submit to the workshop organizers.

Submissions, in PDF format only, should be sent by email to nysmith at ai.sri.com (remove the spaces) using the subject line ICAPS'07 Workshop Submission.

All workshop participants must be registered for ICAPS'07 or CP'07.

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Important Dates

The schedule of important dates for the workshop is as follows:

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Workshop Schedule

ICAPS'07/CP'07 registration begins at 8am. All workshop attendees must be registered for one of the co-located conferences. Following the workshop, the conference opening reception is from 6:15-8:30pm.

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Organization

Organizing Committee

Jeremy Frank (NASA Ames Research Center, USA)
Lee McCluskey (University of Huddersfield, UK)
Karen Myers (SRI International, USA)
Neil Yorke-Smith (SRI International, USA)

Programme Committee

Luis Castillo (University of Granada, Spain)
Gabriella Cortellessa (ISTC-CNR, Italy)
François Félix Ingrand (LAAS/CNRS, France)
Tim Menzies (West Virginia University, USA)
Cori Schauer (NASA Ames Research Center, USA)
Stephen F. Smith (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Biplav Srivastava (IBM Research Labs, India)
Mark Wallace (Monash University, Australia)

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