------------------------------------------------ S P A R K Scheduling and Planning Applications woRKshop An ICAPS'09 Workshop Thessaloniki, Greece September 19/20, 2009 ------------------------------------------------ http://decsai.ugr.es/~lcv/SPARK/09/index.htm ------------------------------------------------ AIM A perennial question in the AI planning and scheduling community is why such an applicable research field finds so little use. What keeps from the real world the advances made over recent years? The international Scheduling and Planning Applications woRKshop (SPARK) series was established to help address the gap. The aim of the workshop series is to provide a stable, long-term forum collocated with ICAPS, where researchers and practitioners can discuss the applications of planning and scheduling techniques to real problems rather than academic toy benchmarks. That is, these domains and instances should be under study for, or closely inspired by, a real industrial/commercial deployment of P&S techniques. This workshop follows antecedent meetings at previous years of ICAPS, especially in first SPARK workshop in 2008. 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 (http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php). 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 3, 2009 Workshop date: September 19 or 20, 2009 (tba) ORGANIZATION * Luis Castillo, University of Granada, Spain L.Castillo at decsai.ugr.es * Gabriella Cortellessa, ISTC-CNR, Italy gabriella.cortellessa at istc.cnr.it * Neil Yorke-Smith, SRI International, USA nysmith at ai.sri.com PROGRAMME COMMITTEE * Roman Bartak, Charles U, CZ * Mark Boddy, Adventium Labs, US * Daniel Borrajo, U Carlos III de Madrid, ES * Luis Castillo, U Granada, ES * Steve Chien, NASA JPL, US * Gabriella Cortellessa, ISTC-CNR, IT * Andrew Davenport, IBM Yorktown, US * Minh Do, PARC, US * Juan Fernández-Olivares, U Granada, ES * Oscar García-Pérez, IActive Intelligent Solutions, ES * Felix Ingrand, LAAS, FR * Peter Jarvis, NASA Ames, US * Philippe Laborie, ILOG, FR * Karen Myers, SRI International, US * Nicola Policella, ESOC, GE * Rong Qu, U Nottingham, UK * Riccardo Rasconi, ISTC-CNR, IT * Tiago Vaquero, U Sao Paulo, BR * Gerard Verfaillie, CERT, FR * Neil Yorke-Smith, SRI International, US ------------------------------------------------