Scheduling and Planning Applications woRKshop (SPARK)

Application domains that contain planning and scheduling (P&S) problems present a set of interesting challenges to the AI planning and scheduling community - from modeling to technical to institutional issues. New real-world domains and problems are becoming increasingly affordable for AI. The international Scheduling and Planning Applications woRKshop (SPARK) series was established to foster the practical application of advances made in the AI P&S community.

Workshop Aim

The workshop aims to provide a stable forum on relevant topics connected to application-focused research and the deployment of P&S systems. The immediate legacy began in 2007 with the ICAPS'07 Workshop on Moving Planning and Scheduling Systems into the Real World, and continued in 2008-2016 with successful yearly editions.

The websites of the previous editions of the workshop series are available at http://decsai.ugr.es/~lcv/SPARK/. These workshops presented a stimulating environment where researchers could discuss the opportunity and challenges in moving P&S developments into practice, and analyze domains and problem instances under study for, or closely inspired by, real industrial/commercial deployment of P&S techniques.

This is the 10th edition of SPARK. The previous editions saw substantial attendance with respect to other collocated events (about 30+ people every year since 2007). This success, together with the recent creation of the Novel Applications track at ICAPS make SPARK:

• The ideal incubator to test, discuss, mature and improve potential papers for that main track with the feedback of an excellent audience
• A great place for the inception of new applications and challenges

The challenges and discussions that emerged in the last years' editions set the baseline for this year's SPARK workshop. A goal of the workshop series is 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, towards a library of practical benchmarking problems that could also be useful for the community.

Format

The workshop will retain the successful format of previous SPARK editions. Each session will have presentation from the accepted papers and invited speakers.

Topics

Starting from the results of the previous editions, SPARK'17 will deepen the debate on application-relevant aspects of P&S theory and practice, with the aim of reporting and discussing experiences relating to deploying P&S systems.

Topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Novel domains and benchmark or challenge problems
• 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)
• Modelling and domain model acquisition
• Handling dynamic and uncertain sources of knowledge
• Algorithmic and technological issues
• Plan execution and replanning
• Mixed initiative approaches
• User interface design, visualization and explanation
• Machine learning methodologies applied to P&S systems
• Engineering, deployment, and maintenance
• Evaluation, testing, and validation
• Assessment of impact on end users

Tentative Schedule

Monday (June 19, 2017)

Submission Information

Submissions may be regular papers (up to 8 pages plus references) or short position papers (up to 2 pages, including 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 note that the submissions to SPARK 2017 must be anonymous in order to be considered for the fast-track submission. Also while SPARK will accept submissions that are under review, those submissions must be anonymous.

Submissions, in PDF format, maust be submitted via the EasyChair site:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=spark2017

Important Dates

Submission deadline for papers: March 17 20, 2017
Notification of acceptance/rejection: April 20, 2017
Camera-ready version due: May 22, 2017
Workshop Date: June 19, 2017

Accepted Papers as a long presentation (25 min including discussion)

• John Bresina, Paul Morris, Matt Deans, Tamar Cohen and David Lees. Traverse Planning with Temporal-Spatial Constraints
• Sandhya Saisubramanian, Shlomo Zilberstein and Prashant Shenoy. Optimizing Electric Vehicle Charging Through Determinization.
• Shirin Sohrabi, Anton Riabov and Octavian Udrea. Planning-based Scenario Generation for Enterprise Risk Management.
• Sachini Weerawardhana and Mark Roberts. Domain-independent Metrics for Deciding When to Intervene.
• Davide Venturelli, Minh Do, Eleanor Rieffel and Jeremy Frank. Temporal Planning for Compilation of Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm Circuits.

Accepted Papers as a short presentation (15 min including discussion)

• Sven Koenig and T. K. Satish Kumar. A Case for Collaborative Construction as Testbed for Cooperative Multi-Agent Planning.
• Saad Khan and Simon Parkinson. Towards Automated Vulnerability Assessment.
• Evridiki Ntagiou, Claudio Iacopino, Nicola Policella, Roberto Armellin and Alessandro Donati. Coverage Planning for Earth Observation Constellations.

Organization

• Sara Bernardini, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
• Shirin Sohrabi, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
• Simon Parkinson, University of Huddersfield, UK
• Kartik Talamadupula, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Program committee

• Chiara Piacentini (University of Toronto)
• Christophe Guettier (SAFRAN)
• Gabriella Cortellessa (CNR-ISTC, National Research Council of Italy)
• Minh Do (NASA Ames Research Center)
• Mark Johnston (JPL/California Inst. of Technology)
• Mauro Vallati (University of Huddersfield)
• Lukas Chrpa (University of Huddersfield)
• Alexandre Albore (Onera & INRA)
• Ramiro Varela (University of Oviedo)
• Simone Fratini (European Space Agency - ESA/ESOC)
• Bram Ridder (King's College London)
• Terry Zimmerman (University of Washington - Bothell)
• Tiago Stegun Vaquero (MIT and Caltech)
• Angelo Oddi (ISTC-CNR, Italian National Research Council)
• Riccardo Rasconi (ISTC-CNR)
• Nicola Policella (ESA/ESOC)
• Patrik Haslum (Australian National University)