Scheduling and Planning Applications woRKshop

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.

Important dates

 

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

Organizers

• 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