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Notice:
New submission deadline: May 4, 2001
Best Paper Award supported by Artificial Intelligence Journal
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ECP-01
6th European Conference on Planning
September 12 - 14, 2001
Toledo, Spain
CALL FOR PAPERS
http://scalab.uc3m.es/~ecp01/
http://pst.ip.rm.cnr.it/ECP/
ECP is a major international conference for presentation of new research in
AI Planning and Scheduling, and a fruitful opportunity for contact and
cross-fertilization among the different ``souls'' in the field. It has
taken place in Europe every other year since 1991. It has evolved very
quickly from a restricted workshop mainly devoted to the presentation of
European research to a well established conference devoted to the
presentation of rigorous and innovative research results from the
international community. The sixth ECP conference will take place in the
center of historical Toledo, the very well known old Spanish city, crossing
of many different cultures (Arabic, Jewish and Christian). ECP-01 would
like to follow its established scientific tradition, also including events
that highlight specific aspects of planning and scheduling research in the
new millennium.
TOPICS
ECP-01 encourages submissions on any topic in the planning and scheduling
domain. The papers, which should be original, innovative and of high
technical quality, may concern, not exhaustively, any of the following
topics:
*domain-independent planning *planning and complexity *planning and
scheduling under uncertainty *scheduling algorithms *decision-theoretic
planning and scheduling *planning and reasoning about actions *plan
recognition *planning and perception *planning and learning *knowledge
engineering techniques for planning and scheduling *planning and scheduling
with complex domain models *deductive planning *model-theoretic approaches
to planning *constraint reasoning for planning and scheduling *distributed
and multi-agent planning and scheduling *planning and execution *reactive
planning *dynamic scheduling *scalability in planning and scheduling
*mixed-initiative problem solving *case-based planning *robot planning
*applications of planning and scheduling *planning, scheduling and the new
information technology.
In addition, ECP-01 will include two special tracks that particularly
testify to the current effort of the AI planning and scheduling community
to create a bridge between labs and the real world. If sufficiently many
good papers are submitted on these topics, they will be specially grouped
within the regular sessions. There may also be discussion panels and/or
invited talks on these topics. The special tracks are the following:
Planning, scheduling, and their integration:
In the last ten years, there has been increasing awareness of the
importance of integrating planning and scheduling techniques. In fact such
integration may create a useful premise for addressing very complex real
problems (e.g., the control of various autonomous systems). At present
examples of the integration exist in some software architectures but the
understanding of the theoretical basis of this integration is at an early
stage. Many relevant questions remain open, such as: the role of
constraint-satisfaction techniques as the common root for such integration;
the issue of interleaving planning and scheduling versus actually
integrating them; the role that languages for describing the domain
features play in planning and scheduling; and the analysis of the classes
of problems where such integration is actually needed.
Plans, schedules and their robustness:
When considering the solution of a given planning/scheduling problem in
isolation, a natural measure of solution quality is plan minimal length.
When problem solving is performed within the broader perspective of a plan
life-cycle, other metrics become relevant. One class of such metrics
concerns plan robustness, where robustness might be broadly defined as the
ability of a plan to be resistant to changes over its lifetime. The
concept of robustness is implicitly contained in some current research but
an explicitation of the problems it involves requires attention. We would
like to create an opportunity for discussing issues related to
plan/schedule robustness in the large, including the development of clear
definitions of and evaluation metrics for robustness, the design of methods
for producing ``robust plans'', clarification of the role of formal
verification and validation in this concern, and comparison of the
differences that may exist between robust planning and scheduling.
The same standards will be applied to papers whether or not they are on the
special topics. Additionally, ECP-01 encourages submission in the
following special categories:
Benchmarks: descriptions of test cases derived from significant real
wold problems or formulation of artificial problems that clearly
point out difficulties not addressed by current technology. In both
cases the description should be accurate and detailed enough to allow
other research to reproduce/use it.
Demonstrations: descriptions of real world prototypes and demonstration
systems that show planning and scheduling systems taken not only in
isolation but also used/embedded in larger systems. Submission in
this category should have a running demo to be showed during a
specific event at the conference.
Submissions in these last two categories will be reviewed by a specific
subgroup within the program committee that will judge both their pertinence
and relevance, and also recommend how they will be presented at the
conference. Selected submissions in both categories will appear in a
special section on the conference post-proceedings, in addition they will
be allotted space on the permanent Web pages of PLANET---the European
Network of Excellence in AI Planning and
Scheduling(http://planet.dfki.de/).
SUBMISSION
Papers should have a front page containing the title, the names and full
addresses---including e-mail addresses and fax numbers---of all authors,
keywords, and a 100-200 word abstract. Papers should be written in
English, in 12pt type and must not exceed 12 pages, excluding front page
and references. Please specify in the first page immediately after the
abstract a list of keywords characterizing your work. If you are
submitting a paper to a special track or special category please select one
of the following items as your first keyword: ``INTEGRATION'',
``ROBUSTNESS'', ``BENCHMARK'', or ``DEMO''. The primary means of
submission will be electronic, in PostScript or PDF format. Papers should
be compressed using compress or gzip, then encoded using uuencode, and
e-mailed to the programme chair. If electronic submission is not possible,
five hard copies should be sent to the postal address given below. All
papers must reach the programme chair by
May 4, 2001
Notification of acceptance or rejection will be mailed to the first or
designated author on or before June 15, 2001. Accepted papers must be
presented at the conference, in English, by one of the authors. As usual
for ECP, the edited version of all the accepted papers will be included in
the official conference post-proceedings published by Springer-Verlag in
the LNAI series.
BEST PAPER AWARD
The Artificial Intelligence Journal will support a best paper award for
ECP-01.
Additionally the ECP program committee members will nominate 3-5 high
quality papers that they believe would provide the basis for good,
potentially extended papers for the AIJ. AIJ will invite the authors of
these papers to submit a revised version for publication in the Journal
(with a promise from the Journal to provide a rapid reviewing turnaround).
PROGRAMME COMMITEE
Ruth Aylett (University of Salford)
Chris Beck (ILOG S.A.)
Michael Beetz (University of Bonn)
Susanne Biundo (University of Ulm)
Daniel Borrajo (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid -- local chair)
Luis Castillo (Universidad de Grenada)
Amedeo Cesta (Nat. Research Council of Italy -- programme chair)
Steve Chien (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
Berthe Choueiry (University of Nebrasca at Lincoln)
Rina Dechter (University of California at Irvine)
Giuseppe De Giacomo (University of Rome ``La Sapienza'')
Maria Fox (University of Durham)
Hector Geffner (Universidad Simon Bolivar)
Alfonso Gerevini (University of Brescia)
Malik Ghallab (LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse)
Enrico Giunchiglia (University of Genoa)
Joachim Hertzberg (GMD, St.Augustin)
Peter Jonsson (University of Linkoping)
Subbarao Kambhampati (Arizona State University)
Jana Koehler (Schindler Lifts S.A.)
Sven Koenig (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Claude Le Pape (ILOG S.A.)
Lee McCluskey (University of Huddersfield)
Alfredo Milani (University of Perugia)
Nicola Muscettola (NASA Ames Research Center)
Karen Myers (SRI, Menlo Park)
Martha Pollack (University of Michigan)
Jussi Rintanen (Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg)
Alessandro Saffiotti (University of Orebro)
Camilla Schwind (LIM-CNRS, Marseille)
David E. Smith (NASA Ames Research Center)
Stephen F. Smith (Carnegie Mellon University)
Sam Steel (University of Essex)
Sylvie Thiebaux (CSIRO, Canberra)
Paolo Traverso (IRST, Trento)
Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University).
Programme Chair: Local Arrangements Chair:
Amedeo Cesta Daniel Borrajo
National Research Council of Italy Departamento de Informatica - ScaLAB
IP-CNR [PST] Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Viale Marx, 15 Avda. de la Universidad, 30
I-00137 Rome 28911-Leganes, Madrid
Italy Spain
e-mail: cesta@ip.rm.cnr.it e-mail: dborrajo@ia.uc3m.es
CURRENT SPONSOR LIST
AIJ, PLANET, AI*IA, Univ. Carlos III de Madrid, IP-CNR, SCALAB, PST
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