WS 1: Scheduling and Planning Applications woRKshop (SPARK)

Application domains that contain planning and scheduling (P&S) problems pose a combination of issues, from modelling to technological to institutional, that present challenges to the AI planning and scheduling community. New domains and real-world problems are becoming increasingly affordable for AI.

The international Scheduling and Planning Applications woRKshop (SPARK) series was established to help address the gap between developments in the AI P&S community and application of these advances.

The full SPARK proceedings are now available.

Schedule

	Sessioni 1: Social, Business, and Diagnostic Processes
08:30-09:00	Daniele Magazzeni, Fabio Mercorio, Balbir Barn, Tony Clark, Franco Raimondi and Vinay Kulkarni Temporal Planning for Business Process Optimisation
09:00-09:30	Anton Riabov, Shirin Sohrabi and Octavian Udrea New Algorithms for The Top-K Planning Problem
09:30-10:00	Mary Ellen Foster and Ronald Petrick Planning for Social Interaction with Sensor Uncertainty
10:00-10:30	Coffee Break
	Sessioni 2: Transportation & Logistics
10:30-11:00	Eduardo Lalla-Ruiz, Christopher Expósito-Izquierdo, Belén Melian-Batista and J. Marcos Moreno-Vega Optimization Approach for the Management of Transshipment Operations in Maritime Container Terminals
11:00-11:30	Falilat Jimoh, Lukas Chrpa and Lee Mccluskey The Application of Planning to Urban Trafﬁc Control
11:30-12:00	Lydia Manikonda, Tathagata Chakraborti, Sushovan De, Kartik Talamadupula and Subbarao Kambhampati AI-MIX: Using Automated Planning to Steer HumanWorkers Towards Better Crowdsourced Plans
12:00-13:45	Lunch Break
	Sessioni 3: Invited Talk + Aerospace Applications (1st Part)
13:45-14:45	Keynote: Steve Chien
14:45-15:15	Mark Giuliano A Case Study Using Hubble Space Telescope Long Range Planning
15:15-15:45	Coffee Break
	Sessioni 4: Aerospace Applications (2nd Part)
15:45-16:15	David Smith, Javier Barreiro and Minh Do Intelligent UAS Sense-and-Avoid Utilizing Global Constraints
16:15-16:45	Kristen Brent Venable, Bob Morris, Matthew Johnson, Aliyeh Mousavi and Nikunj Oza A machine learning surrogate for rotorcraft noise optimization
16:45-17:15	Concluding Remarks

Invited Talk: Steve Chien

Title: Activity-based Scheduling of Science Campaigns for the Rosetta Orbiter: An Early Report on Operations

Abstract: Rosetta is an ESA-led cornerstone mission that will reach the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August 2014 and will escort the comet for a 1.5 year nominal mission offering the most detailed study of a comet ever undertaken by humankind. The Rosetta orbiter has 11 scientific instruments (4 remote sensing) and the Philae lander to make complementary measurements of the comet nucleus, coma (gas and dust), and surrounding environment. Constructing the science plan for the Rosetta mission is a complex, challenging problem that requires careful consideration of the mission phase, comet state, instrument state, spacecraft location and viewing geometry, and resources such as power and data volume. The ASPEN scheduler is being used for Skeleton, Long Term, and early Medium term science planning for the Rosetta Orbiter. In this talk I will describe some of the challenging aspects of Rosetta science planning from an automated scheduling perspective, including: geometric constraints, diverse constraints, large search space, complex objective functions, and a tremendous amount of human expertise to leverage. I will highlight these topics using examples from development of pre-lander-deployment plans developed using ASPEN.

Bio: Steve Chien is the Head of the Artificial Intelligence Group and Senior Research Scientist in the Mission Planning and Execution Section at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology where he leads efforts in automated planning and scheduling for space exploration. He is a four-time honoree in the NASA Software of the Year Competition and has led the deployment of onboard autonomy software to several missions including Earth Observing One and the Mars Exploration Rovers.

Objectives and Topics

The workshop aims to provide a stable forum on relevant topics connected to application-focused research and the deployment of P&S systems.

The immediate legacy began in 2007 with the ICAPS'07 Workshop on Moving Planning and Scheduling Systems into the Real World, and continued in 2008-2013 with successful yearly editions.

The websites of the previous editions of the workshop series are available at http://decsai.ugr.es/~lcv/SPARK/.

These workshops presented a stimulating environment where researchers could discuss the opportunity and challenges in moving P&S developments into practice, and analyze domains and problem instances under study for, or closely inspired by, real industrial/commercial deployment of P&S techniques.

This is the 8th edition of SPARK. The previous editions saw substantial attendance with respect to other collocated events (about 30+ people every year since 2007)

This success, together with the new creation, last year, of the Novel Applications track that continues this year make SPARK:

The ideal incubator to test, discuss, mature and improve potential papers for that main track with the feedback of an excellent audience.
A great place for the inception of new applications and challenges.

The challenges and discussions that emerged in the last years' editions set the baseline for this year's SPARK workshop. A goal of the workshop series is the definition of a longer term set of challenges that could be of benefit for the research community as well as practitioners.

During SPARK14, we will continue discussing the formation of the Special Interest Group on Application of Planning & Scheduling (SIGAPS). This is a coordinated effort on increase the visibility of the application-oriented planning and scheduling research and engineering carried out in the research community, drive initiatives into more applied and transferable research, and promote/foster a closer relationship with industry.

Authors of accepted papers will be encouraged to share their domains and instances, or parts of them, towards a library of practical benchmarking problems that could also be useful for the community.

Starting from the results of the previous editions, SPARK'14 will deepen the debate on application-relevant aspects of P&S theory and practice, with the aim of reporting and discussing experiences relating to deploying P&S systems.

Topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:

Novel domains and benchmark or challenge problems
Experiences in deploying P&S systems, from their conception to their maturity in practice
Comparison with previously existing technologies and/or systems
Integration of operational knowledge from existing legacy components
Integration of multiple sources of knowledge and reasoning schemes (actions, time, resources)
Algorithmic and technological issues
Mixed initiative approaches
User interface design, visualization and explanation
Machine learning methodologies applied to P&S systems
Handling dynamic and uncertain sources of knowledge
Engineering, deployment, and maintenance
Evaluation, testing, and validation
Plan execution and replanning
Assessment of impact on end users
Modelling and domain model acquisition

Workshop Format

The workshop will retain the successful format of previous SPARK editions.

In order to foster discussion amongst speakers and attendees, reviewers of submissions will be asked to write a public critique of each paper composed by a set of public questions or thoughts, in addition to regular private comments to the authors and confidential comments to the organizers. These critiques will also be provided to the authors in advance of the workshop and distributed among the workshop attendees.

Each session will consist of presentations of technical papers, their commentaries, and a short discussion on the topic of papers.

The SPARK'14 workshop will feature a panel discussion aiming at wrapping up all the relevant issues and challenges as possible propositions for future editions of the series.

Accepted Papers

Optimization Approach for the Management of Transshipment Operations in Maritime Container Terminals.
Eduardo Lalla-Ruiz, Christopher Expósito-Izquierdo, Belén Melian-Batista and J. Marcos Moreno-Vega.
Temporal Planning for Business Process Optimisation.
Daniele Magazzeni, Fabio Mercorio, Balbir Barn, Tony Clark, Franco Raimondi and Vinay Kulkarni.
New Algorithms for The Top-K Planning Problem.
Anton Riabov, Shirin Sohrabi and Octavian Udrea.
The Application of Planning to Urban Trafﬁc Control.
Falilat Jimoh, Lukas Chrpa and Lee Mccluskey.
Extending the Knowledge-Level Approach to Planning for Social Interaction to Address Sensor Uncertainty.
Mary Ellen Foster and Ronald Petrick.
Exploring High Dimensional Metric Spaces: A Case Study Using Hubble Space Telescope Long Range Planning.
Mark Giuliano.
Intelligent UAS Sense-and-Avoid Utilizing Global Constraints.
David Smith, Javier Barreiro and Minh Do.
AI-MIX: How a Planner Can Help Guide Humans Towards a Better Crowdsourced Plan.
Lydia Manikonda, Tathagata Chakraborti, Sushovan De, Kartik Talamadupula and Subbarao Kambhampati.
A machine learning surrogate for rotorcraft noise optimization.
Kristen Brent Venable, Bob Morris, Matthew Johnson, Aliyeh Mousavi and Nikunj Oza.

Submission

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 formatting guidelines and style. Submissions will be reviewed by at least two referees. Interested contributors are invited to communicate their intent to submit to the workshop organizers.

Submissions, in PDF format, may be submitted via the EasyChair site.

All workshop participants must be registered for ICAPS'14 or one of the co-located conferences.

Important Dates

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

Organizing Committee

Gabriella Cortellessa(ISTC-CNR, Italy)
Mark Giuliano (Space Telescope Science Institute, USA)
Riccardo Rasconi (ISTC-CNR, Italy)
Neil Yorke-Smith (American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and University of Cambridge, UK)

Program Committee

Laura Barbulescu (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Anthony Barrett (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA)
Mark Boddy (Adventium, USA)
Luis Castillo (University of Granada, Spain)
Gabriella Cortellessa (ISTC-CNR, Italy), Co-Chair
Riccardo De Benedictis (ISTC-CNR, Italy)
Minh Do (SGT Inc., NASA Ames, USA)
Simone Fratini (ESA-ESOC, Germany)
Mark Giuliano (Space Telescope Science Institute), Co-Chair
Christophe Guettier (SAGEM, France)
Patrik Haslum (NICTA, Australia)
Nicola Policella (ESA-ESOC, Germany)
Riccardo Rasconi (ISTC-CNR, Italy), Co-Chair
Bernd Schattenberg (University of Ulm)
Tiago Vaquero (University of Toronto)
Ramiro Varela (Universityof Oviedo)
Gérard Verfaillie (ONERA, France)
Neil Yorke-Smith (American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and University of Cambridge, UK), Co-Chair
Terry Zimmerman