WS 8: Heuristics and Search for Domain-independent Planning (HSDIP)

Heuristics and search algorithms are the two key components of heuristic search, one of the main approaches to many variations of domain-independent planning, including classical planning, temporal planning, planning under uncertainty and adversarial planning. This workshop seeks to understand the underlying principles of current heuristics and search methods, their limitations, ways for overcoming those limitations, as well as the synergy between heuristics and search.

The full HSDIP proceedings are now available.

Schedule

Topics and Objectives

State-space search guided by heuristics, automatically derived from the problem representation, has been one of the most popular, and arguably one of the most successful, approaches to domain-independent planning in the last decade. While there has been significant developments in the design of planning heuristics, such that there are now many different kinds of heuristics, and some theories of how they relate to each other have begun to emerge, there is also a growing realization that the search algorithm plays an equally important role in the approach. Recent work has highlighted some of the weaknesses of some search algorithms, but also the rich opportunities for exploiting synergies between the heuristic calculation and the search to improve both, drawing on the fact that domain-independent planning offers a declarative description of the state space (not just a "black box" successor function).

The workshop on Heuristics and Search for Domain-Independent Planning (HSDIP) is the sixth workshop in a series that started with the "Heuristics for Domain-Independent Planning" (HDIP) workshops at ICAPS 2007. At ICAPS 2012, the workshop was changed to its current name and scope to explicitly encourage work on search for domain-independent planning.

Examples of typical topics for submissions to this workshop are:

• automatic derivation of heuristic estimators for domain-independent planning
• search techniques for domain-independent planning
• synergy between heuristics and search in domain-independent planning
• challenging domains for heuristic search planning

Accepted Papers

• "Distance"? Who Cares? Tailoring Merge-and-Shrink Heuristics to Detect Unsolvability.
  Jörg Hoffmann, Peter Kissmann and Alvaro Torralba.
• What Does it Take to Render h^+(Pi^C) Perfect?
  Jörg Hoffmann, Marcel Steinmetz and Patrik Haslum.
• Korf's Conjecture and the Future of Abstraction-based Heuristics.
  Robert Holte.
• A Practical, Integer-Linear Programming Model for the Delete-Relaxation in Cost-Optimal Planning.
  Tatsuya Imai and Alex Fukunaga.
• Pushing the Limits of Partial Delete Relaxation: Red-Black DAG Heuristics.
  Michael Katz and Jörg Hoffmann.
• Learning Pruning Rules for Heuristic Search Planning.
  Michal Krajnansky, Jörg Hoffmann, Olivier Buffet and Alan Fern.
• Width-based Algorithms for Classical Planning: New Results.
  Nir Lipovetzky and Hector Geffner.
• Landmarks in Oversubscription Planning.
  Vitaly Mirkis and Carmel Domshlak.
• Delete Relaxation and Traps in General Two-Player Zero-Sum Games.
  Thorsten Rauber, Denis Müller, Peter Kissmann and Jörg Hoffmann.
• Optimal Planning in the Presence of Conditional Effects: Extending LM-Cut with Context Splitting.
  Gabriele Röger, Florian Pommerening and Malte Helmert.
• To reopen or not to reopen in the context of Weighted A*? Classifications of different trends.
  Vitali Sepetnitsky, Ariel Felner and Roni Stern.
• Generalized Label Reduction for Merge-and-Shrink Heuristics.
  Silvan Sievers, Martin Wehrle and Malte Helmert.
• Adding Local Exploration to Greedy Best-First Search in Satisficing Planning.
  Fan Xie, Martin Mueller and Robert Holte.
• Type-based Exploration with Multiple Search Queues for Satisficing Planning.
  Fan Xie, Martin Mueller, Robert Holte and Tatsuya Imai.

Submission

Please format submissions in AAAI style and keep them to at most 9 pages including references. Authors considering submitting to the workshop papers rejected from the main conference, please ensure you do your utmost to address the comments given by ICAPS reviewers. Please do not submit papers that are already accepted for the main conference to the workshop.

Submissions should be made through EasyChair.

Important Dates

• Paper submission: March 7th, 2014
• Notification of acceptance: March 20th, 2014
• Camera-ready paper submissions: TBA
• Workshop date: June 22nd, 2014

Organizing Committee

• J. Benton (SIFT, USA)
• Patrik Haslum (NICTA/ANU, Australia)
• Malte Helmert (University of Basel, Switzerland)
• Michael Katz (IBM Research, Israel)
• Jordan Thayer (SIFT, USA)