Scheduling and Planning Applications woRKshop

Call for papers

Download the ASCII version of the call for papers.

This workshop follows antecedent meetings at previous years of ICAPS. The challenges and discussions that emerged from last year's edition set the baseline for this year's SPARK workshop. They represent a first step toward the definition of a longer term set of challenges that could be of benefit for the research community as well as practitioners. Authors of accepted papers will be encouraged to share their domains and instances or parts of them to begin a library of practical benchmarking problems that could also be useful for the community.

The best papers from SPARK'08 were invited to a special issue of the journal Computational Intelligence. The highest quality papers from SPARK'09 will be eligible for a journal special issue or post-proceedings volume.

FORMAT

The workshop will consist of a single full day. All submissions will be reviewed by selected program committee members. The goal of the reviewing process will be to ensure the quality of the submitted papers and provide feedback to authors.

 

In order to foster discussion amongst participants, the workshop will follow a commentary scheme. Reviewers will be asked to write a public critique of each paper composed of a set of public questions or thoughts, given that they are not confidential and that authors have been previously informed. This list of public questions will be distributed amongst the audience, so that participants may judge for themselves and raise their own questions to speakers. Each session will consist of presentations of technical papers, their commentaries, and a short discussion on the topic of the session. The workshop will conclude with a panel discussion to gather the relevant issues and challenges that could be inherited by future editions of this workshop.

 

TOPICS

We explicitly encourage contributions from both scheduling and planning backgrounds, as well as from those outside the traditional ICAPS community who can contribute to the themes of the workshop. Practitioners and researchers are equally welcome. The workshop will highlight relevant aspects related to the fielding of these techniques, including, but not limited to:

• 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
• Assessment of impact on end users, developers, and organizations

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

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 style template. 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 only, should be sent by email to nysmith at ai.sri.com (remove the spaces) using the subject line "ICAPS'09 SPARK Submission".

All workshop participants must be registered for ICAPS'09.
 

Important dates

Deadline for papers:	June 23, 2009
Notification of acceptance:	July 22, 2009
Final revisions:	August 6, 2009
Workshop date:	September 20th, 2009