Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
3rd Workshop on Planning and Plan Execution for Real-World Systems
Principles and Practices for Planning in Execution

 To be held in conjunction with
ICAPS'07: 17th International Conference on Automated Planning & Scheduling
September 22-26th, 2007, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

Aim of the Workshop

Early approaches to robot control were based on the Sense-Plan-Act (SPA) paradigm with planning as the core of a control-loop. Using this paradigm, real-world applications merging deliberative and reactive decision have made remarkable strides in the last few years. These systems have evolved from the classical concept of three-layered control running off-board, to demonstrate dynamic control of a multitude of platforms using onboard and hybrid mixed-initiative techniques. In the meantime, automated planning techniques have evolved substantially in the areas of modeling, reasoning methods, and search algorithms. Together these advances open up new possibilities for how planning technology can be applied in execution, but also reveal new concerns like the interaction between different decisional components or the possible conflict between decision and environmental reality. The goal of this workshop is to integrate practical experience in fielded autonomous systems with theoretical and empirical results in automated planning to stimulate new perspectives on the roles and requirements for planning in execution.

The workshop seeks contributions in two key areas. The first is focused on applications of planning in execution dealing with architectural or modeling choices to deal with the dynamic real-world environment. Papers should indicate how the system impacts all stages of application development and deployment. Contributions in this area should elaborate on the rationale underpinning the design and the performance of the resulting system in the field. The second key area is focused on theoretical and empirical results for specific automated planning techniques for on-line use in dynamic and uncertain environments. Contributions in this area should address how and why the methods described might be incorporated into a larger application context.


Scope

The scope of the workshop includes (but not limited to) the following :

  • Planning and Execution in Agent architectures
  • Plan representation and the impact to solving real-world problems
  • Semantics of plan execution and their impact to dealing with uncertainty (temporal, spatial and geometric)
  • Decision-theoretic approaches to mission planning and execution
  • Bounded (time and space) search techniques which deal with environmental uncertainty for plan execution
  • Machine Learning for adaptive event-response
  • Planning and Execution in unstructured, unknown or hostile conditions.


Format

The workshop will span a full day and include a poster session, an invited talk and wrap up with a panel discussion. This workshop is aligned and complementary to one on Moving Planning and Scheduling Systems into the Real World at ICAPS'07. Our workshop will focus on a specific aspect of embodiment of AI Planning/Scheduling technology, the latter workshop will explore the consequent issues of deployment.


Paper Submission

Submissions may be regular papers (at most 6-8 pages) in PDF formal only. All papers should conform to the AAAI style template. Submissions will be reviewed by at least two referees. All submissions should be sent to icaps07-planexec @ mbari.org with the subject line ICAPS'07 Workshop Submission.

All workshop participants will need to be registered while at least one of the authors of accepted paper will need to be registered for ICAPS'07.


Important Dates

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

Paper submission deadline 30 June 2007
Notification of acceptance 30 July 2007
Camera-ready version deadline  6 August 2007
Workshop date 22 September 2007


Organization

Mark Boddy Adventium Labs, USA
Félix Ingrand LAAS, Toulouse, France
(Co-Chair)
Conor McGann MBARI, USA
Paul Morris NASA Ames, USA
Nicola Muscettola Google, USA
David Musliner Honeywell, USA
Frédéric Py MBARI, USA
Kanna Rajan MBARI, USA
(Co-Chair)
Radu Bogdan Rusu    TUM, Munich, Germany
Reid Simmons CMU, USA
   Vandi Verma
   NASA Ames, USA
David Wettergreen CMU, USA

Additionally we are grateful to the following supplemental reviewers:

Michael Beetz
TUM, Munich, Germany
Dan Bryce
SRI Intnl., USA
Richard Dearden Univ. of Birmingham, UK
Ronny Hartanto Univ. of Osnabrueck, Germany
Joachim Hertzberg Univ. of Osnabrueck, Germany
Guillaume Infantes Univ. of Maryland, USA
   Sylvain Joyeux    LAAS, Toulouse, France
Christopher Loerken Univ. of Osnabrueck, Germany
   Florent Teichteil-Konigsbuch
   ONERA, Toulouse, France
Gerard Verfaillie ONERA, Toulouse, France
   Shlomo Zilberstein
   UMass, USA

Last updated:Feb. 06, 2009