WS 5: Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (KEPS)

The goal of the workshop is to promote research in the areas lying between planning & scheduling technology on the one side, and practical applications and problems on the other. Despite recent advances in the area, the performance of planning & scheduling systems is still dependent to a large extent on how problems and domains are formulated, resulting in the need for careful system fine-tuning. Knowledge engineering for planning & scheduling deals with this area, covering the acquisition, formalization, design, validation and maintenance of domain models, and the selection and optimization of appropriate machinery to work on them. These processes impact directly on the success of real planning and scheduling applications. The importance of knowledge engineering techniques is clearly demonstrated by a performance gap between domain-independent planners and planners exploiting domain dependent knowledge.

The full KEPS proceedings are now available.

Schedule

Objectives and Topics

The workshop shall continue the tradition of several ICKEPS competitions and KEPS workshops. Rather than focusing on software tools only, which is the topic of ICKEPS, the workshop will cover all aspects of knowledge engineering for AI planning and scheduling. We seek original papers concentrating on topics ranging from experience reports to the description of new technology in the following areas:

• methods and tools for the acquisition of domain knowledge
• pre- and post-processing techniques for planners and schedulers
• design process of knowledge models for planning and scheduling applications
• metrics for measuring and comparing domain models
• insights into how to choose among formulations of a domain, and the effect of different domain formulations on planner performance
• acquisition and refinement of control knowledge
• formal languages for domain description
• translators from other application-area-specific languages to solver-ready domain models (such as PDDL)
• formats for specification of heuristics, parameters and control knowledge for solvers
• import of domain knowledge from general ontologies
• ontologies for describing the capabilities of planners and schedulers
• automated reformulation of problems
• automated knowledge extraction processes
• validation of domain models, problems and plans
• visualization methods for domain models, search spaces and plans
• mapping domain properties and planning techniques
• plan representation and reuse
• knowledge engineering aspects of plan analysis

We are pleased to accept papers based on recent publications from other (non ICAPS) venues such as specialized conferences (AAMAS, ICRA, KR, ...), or general AI conferences (AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, ...). This must be however clearly indicated in the submitted paper.

Accepted Papers

• Applying Problem Decomposition to Extremely Large Planning Domains.
  Masataro Asai and Alex Fukunaga.
• Knowledge Engineering for Planning-Based Hypothesis Generation.
  Shirin Sohrabi, Octavian Udrea and Anton Riabov.
• Mechanising Theoretical Upper Bounds in Planning.
  Mohammad Abdul Aziz, Charles Gretton and Michael Norrish.
• Goal-directed Generation of Exercise Sets for Upper-Limb Rehabilitation.
  José Carlos Pulido, José Carlos González, Arturo González-Ferrer, Javier García, Fernando Fernández, Antonio Bandera, Pablo Bustos and Cristina Suárez.
• Creating Planning Domain Models in KEWI.
  Gerhard Wickler, Lukas Chrpa and Thomas Leo Mccluskey.
• Eliminating All Redundant Actions from Plans Using SAT and MaxSAT.
  Tomáš Balyo and Lukáš Chrpa.
• Automated Knowledge Engineering Tools in Planning: State-of-the-art and Future Challenges.
  Rabia Jilani, Andrew Crampton, Diane Kitchin and Mauro Vallati.
• Planning with Preferences by Compiling Soft Always Goals into STRIPS with Action Costs.
  Alfonso Emilio Gerevini and Luca Ceriani.

Submission

Two types of papers can be submitted. Full technical papers with the length up to 8 pages are standard research papers. Short application papers with the length up to 2 pages describe a particular system or an application. The papers will be presented at different sessions; the technical papers will have a standard presentation format with commentary, while the application papers will be presented in a dedicated session as a system demonstration (similar to ICKEPS system demo or ICAPS application showcase). All papers should conform to the AAAI style . The papers must be submitted in a PDF format via EasyChair system.Submissions will be reviewed by at least two referees.

Important Dates

• Paper submission: March 7th, 2014
• Notification of acceptance: March 20th, 2014
• Camera-ready paper submissions: May 23rd, 2014
• Workshop date: June 23rd, 2014

Workshop Program Chairs

• Roman Barták, Charles University, Czech Republic roman.bartak@mff.cuni.cz
• Simone Fratini, European Space Agency, Germany simone.fratini@esa.int
• Lee McCluskey, University of Huddersfield, UK t.l.mccluskey@hud.ac.uk
• Tiago Vaquero, University of Toronto, Canada tvaquero@mie.utoronto.ca

Program Committee

• Roman Barták, Charles University, Czech Republic (co-chair)
• Daniel Borrajo, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
• Adi Botea, IBM, Ireland
• Amedeo Cesta, ISTC-CNR, Italy
• Susana Fernández, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
• Simone Fratini, European Space Agency, Germany (co-chair)
• Antonio Garrido, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain
• Arturo González-Ferrer, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
• Felix Ingrand, LAAS-CNRS, France
• Lee McCluskey, University of Huddersfield, UK (co-chair)
• Ugur Kuter, SIFT, USA
• Julie Porteous, Teesside University, UK
• Kanna Rajan, MBARI, USA
• José Reinaldo Silva, University of São Paulo, Brazil
• Tiago Vaquero, University of Toronto, Canada (co-chair)
• Dimitris Vrakas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
• Gerhard Wickler, University of Edinburgh, Scotland