AAAI-2000 Workshop on

Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas, USA, July 30, 2000

The management of constraints is an integral part of today's planning systems. It includes the simple orderings in POP systems as well as the exclusion relations of today's cutting-edge Graphplan-based planners. The need for expressive formalisms with efficient propagation and refinement techniques to extract solutions will grow further given the ongoing orientation toward real-world problems, which are constrained as regards temporal, spatial and many other resources. Constraint programming has much to contribute in this domain.

The workshop will bring together researchers from the AI planning and the constraint programming (including SAT) communities. Despite early work to integrate activity planning and constraint reasoning, there has been little recent exchange between these communities. New interest is now being shown and results from the SAT field have already been integrated in some planners. The workshop will promote communication between researchers and seeks to highlight new and interesting ideas for combining planning with constraint programming. Topics of interest include:

• Hybrid systems: separate planners and constraint solvers
• Integrated systems
• Rich plan representations allowing for a variety of constraints
• Planning with resource constraints
• Planning with nontrivial optimization goals
• Specialized propagation techniques and labeling heuristics
• Planning as constraint satisfaction/optimization
• Extended CSP frameworks for handling planning problems

In addition to paper presentations, there will be invited talks and panel discussions addressing the following topics:

• What can constraint programming offer in terms of planning? What kind of problems can be tackled with which techniques?
• How does a planning problem differ from a constraint satisfaction problem? Can we - and, if so, how can we - cope with these differences?

Attendance will be limited to 40 participants. Participants will be selected based on refereed submissions. If you wish to attend but are not submitting a paper, please send a one-page statement of interest by the submission deadline.

Paper submissions should be no longer than six pages. Guidelines for the submission format can be found at http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Templates/macros-link.html.

Papers may be submitted by e-mailing a document's URL to the workshop chair. If this is not possible, please contact the workshop chair. Accepted submissions will be distributed and included in an AAAI Press technical report.

Submission Deadline:	March 10, 2000
Notification Date:	March 24, 2000
Final Submission Due:	April 26, 2000
Workshop Held:	July 30, 2000

Alexander Nareyek
GMD FIRST
German National Research Center for Information Technology
Research Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology
Kekuléstraße 7
D - 12489 Berlin
Germany

Tel: +49 177 792 37 36
Fax: +49 30 6392 1805
E-mail: alex@ai-center.com

Eugene C. Freuder, University of New Hampshire, ecf@cs.unh.edu
Ulrich Geske, GMD FIRST, geske@first.gmd.de
Subbarao Kambhampati, Arizona State University, rao@asu.edu
Henry Kautz, AT&T Labs, kautz@research.att.com
Nicola Muscettola, NASA Ames, mus@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov
Alexander Nareyek, GMD FIRST, alex@ai-center.com
Austin Tate, University of Edinburgh, a.tate@ed.ac.uk
Peter van Beek, University of Alberta, vanbeek@cs.ualberta.ca

AAAI-2000 Homepage: http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/National/2000/aaai00.html
Workshop Homepage: http://www.ai-center.com/events/aaai-2000-ws

Last update:
18th of July, 2000 by Alexander Nareyek