AIPS workshop on Planning and Scheduling with Multiple Criteria (CFP)

[rao@cotopaxi.eas.asu.edu]

Dear Prof. Kambhampati,

could you please forward this message to the recipients of your e-mail list?

Thank you very much in advance.

Ioannis Refanidis



Workshop on Planning and Scheduling with Multiple Criteria
Toulouse, France, April 23, 2002
http://www.csd.auth.gr/~lpis/aips02

within the
6th International Conference on Planning and Scheduling (AIPS-2002)
Toulouse, France, April 23-27, 2002

Sponsored by PLANET, the European Network of Excellence in AI Planning

Call for Papers/Participation

Most real-world problems demand the consideration of many criteria,
such as plan duration, resource consumption, profit, safety etc, either
separately, or in some combination. In the former case the plans are
optimized for a single criterion and the other criteria are handled
as constraints, whereas in the latter case the plans are optimized
with respect to an arbitrary combination of the criteria. In many cases
the criteria are in conflict and a trade off must be identified. For
example, in a manufacturing domain the criteria may be to maximize
the work in progress (to maximize the number of orders fulfilled)
and minimize inventory (to minimize the amount of raw materials purchased)
but to fulfill a large number of orders a large inventory must be kept.
In addition to resolving conflicts several issues arise when taking
into account multiple criteria, such as defining optimality,
expressing preferences, aggregating the criteria, generating bounds
and/or heuristic distance information, guiding search, pruning branches,
trading off planning time and solution optimality, etc.

Dealing with multiple criteria is not a unique problem faced by researchers
in AI planning and scheduling. Evaluating states and solutions based on
multiple criteria is a problem occurring in other fields, in particular,
combinatorial game search and multi-criteria decision making. Researchers
in these areas have tended to address these related problems from a search
or operations research perspective, respectively.

During the last few years significant improvements have been made in the
capabilities of planning systems to the point that they are now capable
of producing plans with hundreds of actions in a few seconds. While such
performance is commendable, it has been achieved with very simple action
descriptions that would have little applicability on real-world problems.
We believe that it is the time to investigate ways of improving action
descriptions and to handle reasoning with multiple criteria, an area that
has been neglected for too long.

The workshop has several goals:
1. to review the current state of the art in reasoning with multiple
criteria
2. to initiate discussions within the AI planning and scheduling communities
on
   how these problems may be addressed
3. to initiate the transfer of applicable techniques, insights and
experiences
  from other communities such as Operations Research, Uncertainty and Game
communities.

Technical Part
==============
The technical part of the workshop will consist of papers dealing with
multiple
criteria in planning, scheduling, constraint reasoning, decision making,
uncertainty and game search and will focus on, but will not be limited to
addressing the following research questions:

* defining optimality in the presence of multiple criteria
* representing criteria preferences
* computing aggregate criteria
* generic methods to define bounds for multi-criteria branch-and-bound
search
* techniques to guide search based on multiple criteria
* computing heuristic distance information in the presence of more than one
criterion
* near-optimal solutions, hard and soft criteria
* evaluation of planners' performance based on multiple criteria (e.g. in
the planning competition)
* experience in dealing with real world applications

Invited Talks & Panels
======================
To provide a focus for the interactions and discussions we plan to have two
invited
 speakers, one from the planning community having experience in planning
with multiple
 criteria, and one from the game search community. These talks will
summarize the
 state of the art in their respective fields with respect to the issue of
dealing
 with multiple criteria and highlight promising research paths.

Submissions
Papers should be a maximum of 5000 words, and should be submitted by email
to Ioannis Refanidis (yrefanid@csd.auth.gr) in any convenient format
(PDF, PostScript, MS-Word), preferred compressed with gzip or winzip.

Critical Dates
==============
* Paper Submission Deadline: February 11, 2002
* Paper Notification: March 15, 2002
* Final papers Due: March 22, 2002

Organizers
==========
Brian Drabble, CIRL, (drabble@cirl.uoregon.edu)
Jana Koehler, IBM Zurich, (koe@zurich.ibm.com)
Ioannis Refanidis, Aristotle Unversity (yrefanid@csd.auth.gr)

Committee
=========
Mark Boddy, Honeywell
Yannis Dimopoulos, University of Cyprus
Patrick Doherty, Linkoping University
Alfonso Gerevini, University of Brescia
Hector Geffner, Universidad Simon Bolivar
Richard Goodwin, IBM T.J.Watson Center
Martin Mueller, University of Alberta
Nicola Muscettola, NASA
Karen Myers, SRI International
Alexis Tsoukias, LAMSADE, Universite Paris Dauphine
Ioannis Vlahavas, Aristotle University
Joachim Paul Walser, I2 Technologies