Workshop on Integrated Execution of Planning and Acting

The webpage for this workshop is found at: http://makro.ink/icaps2017intex/.

Automated planners are increasingly being integrated into online execution systems. The integration may, for example, embed a domain-independent temporal planner in a manufacturing system (e.g., the Xerox printer application) or autonomous vehicles. The integration may resemble something more like a "planning stack" where an automated planner produces an activity or task plan that is further refined before being executed by a reactive controller (e.g., robotics). Or, the integration may be a domain-specific policy that maps states to actions (e.g., reinforcement learning). Online learning may or may not be involved, and may include adjusting or augmenting the model, determining when to repair versus replan, learning to switch policies, etc. A specific focus of these integrations involves online deliberation, bringing to the foreground concerns over how much computational effort planning should invest over time.

In any of these systems, a planner generates action sequences that are eventually dispatched to an executive, yet taking action in a dynamic world rarely proceeds according to plan. When planning assumptions are challenged during execution, it raises a number of interesting questions about how the system should respond. Is the "acting" side of the system responsible for a response or the "planning" side? Or do the two need to cooperate and how much? When should the activity planner abandon or preempt the current goals? Should the task planner repair a plan or replan from scratch? Should the executive adjust its current policy, switch to a new one, or learn a new policy from more relevant experience?

2017 Theme: Integrated Execution: The Past, Present, and Future

We hope to generate discussion of the past, present, and future of integrated execution:

• Past: the landscape of planning-executive architectures
• Present: languages & tools researchers can use
• Future: Open challenges and holding an integrated execution competition at ICAPS 2018.

Invited topics include

• online planning, acting, and execution
• position papers, benchmarks, or challenge problems for integrated execution
• improving planning performance from execution experience
• anytime or incremental planning
• planning and simulation
• discussions of plan dispatching or plan executives
• execution monitoring; comparing replanning, plan repair, regoaling, plan merging
• goal reasoning, preempting goals, regoaling, soft goals, partial satisfaction of goals
• managing open worlds with closed-world planners; model learning from experience
• determining an observation policy; policy switching; incremental policy adjustment

Format

We plan a one day workshop with a focus on discussion. In contrast to the invited speaker form, we plan to host a series of Festivus debates, where members of the community will be encouraged to highlight a topic relevant to the workshop in as creative a way as possible. Small-group breakouts will address questions raised by the debate so all participants gain from the experience.

Organizing Committee

Mark 'Mak' Roberts*	Naval Research Laboratory, USA	mark.roberts AT nrl.navy.mil	URL
Sara Bernardini	Royal Holloway University, London, UK	sara.bernardini AT rhul.ac.uk	URL
Tim Niemueller	RWTH, Aachen, Germany	niemueller AT kbsg.rwth-aachen.de	URL
Tiago Vaquero	MIT, USA	tvaquero AT mit.edu	URL

Program Committee

Name	Affiliation
Ron Alford	MITRE Corporation, USA
J. Benton	NASA Ames, USA
Mark Boddy	Adventium Labs, USA
Michael Cashmore	King's College London, UK
Jeremy Frank	NASA Ames, USA
Andy Hertle	University of Freiburg, Germany
Nir Lipovetzky	University of Melbourne, Australia
Julie Porteous	Teesside University, UK
Wheeler Ruml	University of New Hampshire, USA
Scott Sanner	University of Toronto, Canada
Vikas Shivashankar	Knexus Research, USA

Submission details

Submissions may be regular papers (up to 8 pages plus references) or short position/challenge papers (up to 4 pages plus references). All papers should conform to the AAAI formatting guidelines and style. Submissions will be reviewed by at least three referees. The top 2 papers based on the reviews will be selected for a fast-track submission to the next ICAPS conference. Please observe anonymous submission guidelines in order to be considered for the fast-track submission.

Submissions will be accepted through easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=intex2017

We welcome existing publications from other venues that are appropriate for discussion at this workshop. Please note in the title area if this work is already accepted at another venue. If the work is under review at another venue (e.g., IJCAI-2017) please notify the organizers so we can avoid potential reviewing conflicts.

At least one author of each accepted paper must attend the workshop in order to present the paper. Authors must register for the ICAPS main conference in order to attend the workshop. There will be no separate workshop-only registration.

Important Dates (estimated)

Submission deadline for papers: March 20, 2017
Notification of acceptance/rejection: April 20, 2017
Camera-ready version due: May 22, 2017
Workshop Date: 19-20 June 2017

Accepted Papers

Autonomous Search-Detect-Track for Small UAVs
Bob Morris, Anjan Chakrabarty, Joshua Baculi, Xavier Bouyssounouse, and Rusty Hunt

Integrating Execution and Rescheduling
Jeremy Frank

Towards Planning With Hierarchies of Learned Markov Decision Processes
John Winder, Shawn Squire, Matthew Landen, Stephanie Milani and Marie desJardins

k-Robust Multi-Agent Path Finding
Dor Atzmon, Roni Stern, Ariel Felner, Roman Bartak, Neng-Fa Zhou and Glenn Wagner

Goal Reasoning as Multilevel Planning
Alison Paredes and Wheeler Ruml

An Architecture for Integrated Timeline Planning and Model-based Execution
Tiago Nogueira and Simone Fratini

Automated Planning with Goal Reasoning in Minecraft
Mark Roberts, Wiktor Piotrowski, Pyrce Bevan, David Aha, Maria Fox, Derek Long, and Daniele Magazzeni

Proceedings

The proceedings for this workshop as a PDF.