Fwd: IWPSS June 2004, Darmstadt, Germany

[Subbarao Kambhampati <rao@asu.edu>]

Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 16:45:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: Kanna.Rajan@nasa.gov
Subject: IWPSS June 2004, Darmstadt, Germany
To: Subbarao Kambhampati <rao@asu.edu>
Reply-to: Kanna.Rajan@nasa.gov
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Computational Sciences Division
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Rao,

Could you please post this at the earliest? Thanks.

-kanna

======================================================================

                *************************************
                *         Call for Papers           *
                *   4th International Workshop on   *
                * Planning and Scheduling for Space *
                ************ IWPSS-04 ***************
                *        June 23rd-25th, 2004       *
                *    ESA/ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany   *
                * http://pst.ip.rm.cnr.it/iwpss-04/ *
                *************************************

This workshop continues a regular series started in October 1997 at
Oxnard, California and continued in San Francisco (2000) and Houston
(2002).  The forth workshop will be held for the first time in Europe
and is focused on the many challenges facing the Planning and
Scheduling community in meeting the broad needs of space applications.

Previous meetings have highlighted the need for advanced
Planning/Scheduling capabilities in the space domain and the limited
success with technology infusion into ESA and NASA missions.  Further,
the missions that various space agencies are contemplating in the near
future will require significant levels of autonomy on the ground and
onboard vehicles, which will be deployed in harsh environments.  The
costs, complexity, and duration of these missions have been on the
rise, requiring significant support from automated tools and
techniques.  While these would have nominally resulted in further
deployments of autonomous systems in such mission critical
environments, we have yet to see Planning/Scheduling systems make
substantial inroads into the space community.  The aim of this
workshop is to understand the state of the art in P&S problem solving
techniques, the current state of the art in real space missions, and
to encapsulate the challenges that lie ahead.

Key issues in P&S technology for space include:

  -- Domain representation and acquisition: The task of representing
     the knowledge needed to perform the critical task of a mission
     and, in particular, the relevant constraints for building domain
     knowledge for planners/schedulers.  Open issues include the
     integration of causal planning knowledge with temporal and
     resource information, knowledge engineering tools for supporting
     knowledge extraction and verification, ontologies for P&S in
     space, and incremental refinement tools that guarantee continuous
     operational support in the space domain.

  -- Applicable algorithmic methods: Given the limitations of hardware
     platforms and response times in harsh environments, a key open
     issue is how to plan with causal, temporal and resource knowledge
     in such a way as to address scalability in the size of the
     problem, on-line computational time bounds, and the synthesis of
     plans that can be robustly executed.

  -- Plan verification: How do we verify that the synthesized plans
     are correct?  Validating the behavior of an automated
     planner/scheduler in an operational context is a major challenge.
     Different approaches are possible and are worth comparing to see
     how they can scale to the kinds of applicable problems in this
     domain.

  -- Applicable embedded architectures: A key role in space is played
     by closed loop P&S architectures.  In fact, agent architectures
     that deal with autonomous operations of spacecraft are a crucial
     tall pole in fielding P&S systems.  These architectures highlight
     all of the issues above as well as the following issues: software
     engineering approaches to building robust commanding systems,
     uncertainty management, fault diagnosis and execution,
     contingency approaches to commanding and failure recovery among
     others.

The aim of this workshop is to discuss these and other related issues
in the context of space missions and applications.  We welcome papers
that offer insight into these, and other, planning and scheduling
challenges.  We especially welcome papers that describe deployed
applications of planning and scheduling technology within space or
space-relevant domains and papers that describe requirements for
planning and scheduling in future missions.  Example applications
include: spacecraft commanding and payload operations; planning and
scheduling for process control; planning and scheduling for robotic
space activities; operations of air, space and ground-based scientific
observatories; scheduling of critical resources on the ground and
on-board; science data analysis; design and analysis of spacecraft
systems; planning and scheduling of scientific experiments; and
planning and scheduling of crew activities.  We also welcome papers on
new planning and scheduling technology that may be applicable to space
domains and papers that integrate planning and scheduling with other
techniques, such as verification and validation, machine learning,
task execution, and fault detection and diagnosis.

Additionally the workshop will highlight a special topic on:

  -- On-ground vs. On-board P&S technology: Space programs are divided
     into ground and flight segments.  P&S techniques have been shown
     to be potentially very useful as a support tool in the ground
     segment (e.g., AMM, MAPGEN, MEXAR) and in the flight segment
     (e.g., DS1 Remote Agent, the EO-1 Sciencecraft).  While the two
     extremes rely on the same core technology, they potentially
     satisfy different needs.  For example, issues like the
     interaction with users for on-ground applications satisfy
     completely different requirements with respect to the problem of
     developing an embedded closed loop application for an on-board
     architecture, but both may rely on the same P&S core.  Indeed, an
     issue of further discussion includes the rationale and design
     features for distributing P&S technology in mission
     sub-components while taking advantage of the common core
     technology.  We encourage papers that shed light on the key
     differences/commonalities on this topic and also that report real
     experience and challenges from the field.

Workshop Organization
---------------------

This workshop will strive to bring together technologists,
researchers, and end-users of planning/scheduling technology.  To
encourage interaction among these groups, we will continue the
commentary format of the previous workshops.  The program committee
will review all submitted papers for acceptance at the workshop.
Accepted papers will be further categorized into plenary and poster
presentations.  For each of the plenary papers, a commentator will be
selected from a different community than that of the paper's authors.
The commentator will be encouraged to have a dialogue with the authors
and will then write a short commentary on the paper, which will be
presented with the paper and will be published in the proceedings.
The commentary is not a review or critique, but simply a way to
encourage interaction between different communities.  Papers selected
for poster presentations will also be published in full in the
proceedings, although they will not have a commentary.  The workshop
will also include panel discussions, invited speakers, and tours of
ESOC.

Timetable
---------
   Submission deadline:                         February 6, 2004
   Authors notified:                            March 15, 2004
   Commentator period:                          March 16 to April 20, 2004
   Camera-ready papers and commentaries:        April 23, 2004
   Dates of workshop:                           June 23-25, 2004

Organizing Committee
--------------------
   Alessandro Donati (ESA/ESOC, Germany), Peter Putz (ESA/ESOC, Germany).

Program Committee
-----------------
   Michael Beetz (Technical University of Munich, Germany),
   Mark Boddy (Adventium Labs, MN),
   Daniel Borrajo (Univ.  Carlos III de Madrid, Spain),
   Amedeo Cesta (ISTC-CNR , Rome, Italy - chair),
   Jimi Crawford (NASA Ames Research Center, CA),
   Philippe David (ESA/ESTEC, The Netherlands),
   Felix Ingrand (LAAS, CNRS, France),
   Mike Jones (ESA/ESOC, Germany),
   Rao Kambhampati (Arizona State Univ., Tempe, AZ),
   Angelo Oddi (ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy),
   Greg Rabideau (JPL, Pasadena, CA),
   Gerard Verfaille (LAAS, CNRS, France),
   Brian Williams (MIT, Cambridge, MA).

Paper Submission
----------------

Papers of up to 10 pages in length (12 point Times Roman font) should
be submitted in electronic format (PDF preferred) through the workshop
web site by February 6th, 2004.  For any inquiry please contact:

          Amedeo Cesta, ISTC-CNR [PST]
          Viale Marx 15, I-00137 Rome, Italy
          E-mail: iwpss-04@pst.ip.rm.cnr.it
          Tel: +39-06-86090-209
          Fax: +39-06-824737