Special Track on Knowledge Engineering, Integrated Execution, and System Architectures

ICAPS 2020, the 30th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, will take place in Nancy, France in July 2020. ICAPS 2020 is part of the ICAPS conference series, the premier forum for exchanging news and research results on theory and applications of intelligent planning and scheduling technology.

The purpose of this Track is to report progress on research that examines the challenges of integrating planning and scheduling as one component among many in a complex system.  The Track emphasizes research on how knowledge is engineered for a system, how a system resolves challenges during execution, and general architectures for embedding planning and scheduling. Accordingly, topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Tools or techniques for the acquisition of domain knowledge
  • Formal languages or ontologies for knowledge sharing
  • Modeling planning problems
  • Planning knowledge models adaptation, validation, and verification
  • Detailed descriptions of principled systems that integrate planning and execution
  • Goal Reasoning
  • Diagnosis and causal reasoning
  • System architectures with implementation
  • Systems evaluated in one or more scenarios
  • Design decisions, potential answers, and lessons learned for integrated systems

Because this track aims to evaluate research progress toward a holistic use of planning and scheduling knowledge and algorithms, our criteria for determining contributions differ from traditional ones. Progress can include demonstrating a new use for automated reasoning, principled studies or descriptions of architectures with embedded planning or scheduling, radically new approaches to knowledge representation, presenting a novel approach to an established problem, or posing new problems or testbeds that challenge existing approaches.  Accordingly, we will guide our Program Committee to evaluate papers along these lines.

Papers most suited to this track will emphasize a “lessons learned” style of reporting with a focus on the design decisions, trade-offs, and limitations considered.  Successful papers will make a claim and present an evaluation of that claim with supporting evidence. Given the breadth and the complexity of the topics covered by this Track, experimental evaluation may not always be possible; different forms of evaluation are indeed acceptable. Papers less suited for this track include descriptions of full vertical deployments that do not describe the conceptual system, application domain descriptions more appropriate for an applications track, or survey papers.

Full evaluation criteria will be made available by mid October.

Please direct any questions to kex.track.icaps2020[at]gmail[dot]com.

Submission Instructions

Important Dates

  • November 15, 2019 Abstracts due (electronic submission)
  • November 20, 2019 Papers due (electronic submission, PDF)
  • January 6-9, 2020 Author feedback period
  • January 20, 2020 Notification of acceptance or rejection

The reference time-zone for all deadlines is UTC-12. That is, as long as there is still some place anywhere in the world where the deadline has not yet passed, you are on time!

Track Chairs

Michael Cashmore, University of Strathclyde
Lukas Chrpa, Czech Technical University
Mark Roberts, Naval Research Laboratory
Mauro Vallati, University of Huddersfield