Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (KEPS 2023)

2023 Workshop on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling
Prague, Czech Republic
July 9-10, 2023

Aim and Scope of the Workshop

Despite the progress in automated planning and scheduling systems, these systems still need to be fed by carefully engineered domain and problem descriptions 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.

The workshop will continue the tradition of several International Competitions on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (ICKEPS) and prior 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 of Interest

We seek original papers ranging from experience reports to the description of new technology in the following areas:

  • 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 describing domains
  • Re-use of domain knowledge
  • Translators from other application area-specific languages to solver-ready domain models (such as PDDL)
  • Formats for the 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

Important Dates

  • Paper submission deadline: March 31, 2023 (UTC-12 time zone)
  • Notification: April 25, 2023
  • Camera-ready paper submission: May 20, 2023

The reference timezone 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!

Submission Details

Two types of papers can be submitted. Full technical papers with the length up to 8 pages + 1 for references, are standard research papers. Short papers with the length between 2 and 4 pages (+1 for references) describe either a particular application or focus on open challenges. All papers must be submitted in a PDF format and must conform to the AAAI author kit instructions for formatting.

The submission will be done via EasyChair

Policy on Previously Published Materials

We are pleased to accept papers based on recent publications from other (non-ICAPS) venues such as specialized conferences (AAMAS, ICRA, KR, …), or general AI conferences (AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, …). Such submissions must be clearly indicated in the paper.

Submissions of papers being reviewed at other venues are welcome since this is a non-archival venue and we will not require a transfer of copyright. If such papers are currently under blind review, please anonymize the submission.

List of Accepted Papers

Workshop Schedule

KEPS is scheduled on the 9th of July 2023.

[10:30 - 11:00] - Coffee Break (get your caffeine shot for enjoying all the talks)

[11:00 - 12:20] - Opening Remarks and Session 1: Modelling and Visualisation

  • “Taming Discretised PDDL+ through Multiple Discretisations”, Matteo Cardellini, Marco Maratea, Francesco Percassi, Enrico Scala and Mauro Vallati.
  • “Planning with Qualitative Action-Trajectory Constraints in PDDL”, Luigi Bonassi, Alfonso Emilio Gerevini and Enrico Scala.
  • “Scheduling Problems in PDDL”, Jan Dolejsi, Derek Long and Michal Stolba.
  • “PDSim: Planning Domain Simulation and Animation with the Unity Game Engine”, Emanuele De Pellegrin and Ron Petrick.
  • “Challenges in Modelling and Solving Plotting with PDDL”, Joan Espasa Arxer, Ian Miguel, Peter Nightingale, Mateu Villaret and András Z. Salamon.

[12:20 - 14:00] - Lunch

[14:00 - 15:30] - Session 2: Acquisition and Learning

  • “Partial Grounding in Planning using Small Language Models”, Felipe Areces, Benjamin Ocampo, Carlos Areces, Martin Dominguez and Daniel Gnad.
  • “Exploring the Limitations of using Large Language Models to Fix Planning Tasks”, Alba Gragera and Alberto Pozanco.
  • “Learning to Act for Perceiving in Partially Unknown Environments”, Leonardo Lamanna, Mohamadreza Faridghasemnia, Alfonso Emilio Gerevini, Alessandro Saetti, Alessandro Saffiotti, Luciano Serafini and Paolo Traverso.
  • “Extracting planning domains from execution traces: a progress report”, Simona Gugliermo, Erik Schaffernicht, Christos Koniaris and Alessandro Saffiotti.
  • “Autonomous Capability Assessment of Black-Box Sequential Decision-Making Systems”, Pulkit Verma, Rushang Karia and Siddharth Srivastava.

[15:30 - 16:00] - Coffee Break

[16:00 - 17:10] - Session 3: Applications & Closing Remarks

  • “Towards a Framework for Intelligent Urban Traffic Routing”, Matyas Svadlenka and Lukas Chrpa.
  • “First Steps Towards Planning for Targeted Medicine”, Lee-Or Alon, Hana Weitman and Gal Kaminka.
  • “A Good Snowman is Hard to Plan”, Miquel Bofill, Cristina Borralleras, Joan Espasa Arxer, Gerard Martin Teixidor, Gustavo A. Patow and Mateu Villaret.
  • “Computing Minimal Unsolvable and Maximal Solvable Abstractions of Planning Problems via Hitting Set Trees”, Michael Welt, Birte Glimm and Milene Santos-Teixeira.

Organising Committee

  • Lukas Chrpa, Czech Technical University
  • Ron Petrick, Heriot-Watt University
  • Mauro Vallati, University of Huddersfield
  • Tiago Vaquero, NASA JPL

Program Committee

  • Sandra Castellanos, Grenoble Computer Science Laboratory, Université Grenoble Alpes
  • Matteo Cardellini, Università degli Studi di Genova
  • Francesco Percassi, University of Huddersfield
  • Luigi Bonassi, Università degli Studi di Brescia
  • Andrea Orlandini, CNR
  • Lee Mccluskey, University of Huddersfield
  • Susana Fernandez, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
  • Simon Parkinson, University of Huddersfield
  • Eva Onaindia, Universitat Politècnica de València
  • Alan Lindsay, Heriot-Watt University
  • Roman Barták, Charles University
  • Simone Fratini, European Space Agency - ESA/ESOC
  • Alessandro Umbrico, National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISTC)
  • Alba Gragera, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
  • Yaniel Carreno, BAE Systems Digital Intelligence & Edinburgh Centre for Robotics
  • Raquel Fuentetaja, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid