The workshop shall continue the tradition of several International Competitions on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (ICKEPS) and KEPS workshops. Rather than focusing only on software tools and domain encoding techniques –which are topics of ICKEPS– the workshop will cover all aspects of knowledge engineering for AI planning and scheduling.

Topics and Objectives

Despite the progress in automated planning and scheduling systems, these systems still need to be fed by carefully engineered domain and problem description and they need to be fine tuned for particular domains and problems. Knowledge engineering for AI planning and scheduling deals with the acquisition, design, validation and maintenance of domain models, and the selection and optimization of appropriate machinery to work on them. These processes impact directly on the success of real-world planning and scheduling applications. The importance of knowledge engineering techniques is clearly demonstrated by a performance gap between domain- independent planners and planners exploiting domain dependent knowledge.

Example of typical topics for submissions in this workshop are:

• formulation of domains and problem descriptions
• methods and tools for the acquisition of domain knowledge
• pre- and post-processing techniques for planners and schedulers
• acquisition and refinement of control knowledge
• formal languages for domain description
• re-use of domain knowledge
• translators from other application-area-specific languages to solver-ready domain models (such as PDDL)
• formats for specification of heuristics, parameters and control knowledge for solvers
• import of domain knowledge from general ontologies
• ontologies for describing the capabilities of planners and schedulers
• automated reformulation of problems
• automated knowledge extraction processes
• domain model, problem and plan validation
• visualization methods for domain models, search spaces and plans
• mapping domain properties and planning techniques
• plan representation and reuse
• knowledge engineering aspects of plan analysis

Submission Information

Two types of papers can be submitted. Full technical papers with the length up to 8 pages (plus one for references) are standard research papers. Short papers with the length between 2 and 4 pages describe either a particular application, or focus on open challenges. All papers should conform to the AAAI style template. The papers must be submitted in a PDF format via the EasyChair system. Submissions will be reviewed by at least two referees.

In order to encourage the submission of original papers to the workshops, the ICAPS council has announced an initiative to fast-track strong workshop papers from one year to the main track of the next ICAPS. Up to two papers will be recommended by the KEPS organisers. The ICAPS 2018 program chairs will have a look at these papers and the workshop reviews and invite the authors of these papers to resubmit them to the ICAPS 2018 main track.

Important Dates

• Paper submission deadline: March 13, 2017 (UTC-12 timezone)
• Notification: April 7, 2017
• Camera-ready paper submission: April 21, 2017

Organising Committee

• Lukas Chrpa, Czech Technical University & Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic
• Mauro Vallati, University of Huddersfield, UK
• Tiago Vaquero, MIT & CalTech, USA

Schedule

Accepted Papers

Proceedings