News Journal on Planning and Scheduling

In addition to the usual conference and workshop announcements, this time you'll find also references to current planning-related competitions: RoboCup, the Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, and the Planning Systems Competition in conjunction with AIPS-98.

The Electronic Colloquium has been extended with a section for Planning and Scheduling Special Interest Groups. You are invited to send additional references.

I am looking forward to receiving further comments and contributions and last but not least: your paper submissions to this first journal for AI Planning and Scheduling are always invited. You'll find the call here.

Susanne Biundo
(area editor)

Austin Tate
Representing Plans as a Set of Constraints -
The < I-N-OVA > Model

Abstract: This paper presents an approach to representing and manipulating plans based on a model of plans as a set of constraints. The < I-N-OVA > ( Issues - Nodes - Orderings/Variables/Auxiliary) model is used to characterise the plan representation used within O-Plan and to relate this work to emerging formal analyses of plans and planning. This synergy of practical and formal approaches can stretch the formal methods to cover realistic plan representations, as needed for real problem solving, and can improve the analysis that is possible for production planning systems.
< I-N-OVA > is intended to act as a bridge to improve dialogue between a number of communities working on formal planning theories, practical planning systems and systems engineering process management methodologies. It is intended to support new work on automatic manipulation of plans, human communication about plans, principled and reliable acquisition of plan information, and formal reasoning about plans.

Remarks:
This paper was previously a conference paper at AIPS-96.
There are detailed models and suggestions for the usage of < I-N-OVA > on the Web available via this page.

Date of Submission:   August 21, 1997

The following articles, which have previously been received, have been accepted by the ETAI after confidential review, thereby achieving proof of high journal quality.

Austin Tate
Representing Plans as a Set of Constraints - The < I-N-OVA > Model

This section lists three current challenges related to planning and scheduling. They were introduced by so-called "challenge papers" at IJCAI-97. More information about the general concept of IJCAI challenge papers is available here.

Submissions of new challenge problems are of course invited for this section.

Can we Bridge Refinement-based and SAT-based Planning Techniques? by Rao Kambhampati. An introduction into the problem and its discussion can be found on Rao's page.

Adaptive Web Sites: An AI Challenge by Mike Perkowitz and Oren Etzioni. The paper is accessible from Oren Etzioni's home page.

The RoboCup Synthetic Agents Challenge 97 by Hiroaki Kitano et al. The paper is available here. More information about RoboCup, the Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences, can be found on this page.

KR-98:   Sixth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.
The conference will be held from June 2nd to 5th in Trento, Italy.
Deadlines: electronic abstracts due: November 26, 1997 · extended abstracts due: December 1, 1997.

AIPS-98:   Fourth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems.
The conference will be held from June 7th to 10th at Carnegy Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA.
Paper submission deadline: December 9, 1997.

UAI-98:   Fourteenth Annual Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence.
The conference will be held from July 24th to 26th in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
Submission deadline: February 23, 1998.

AAAI-98:   Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
The conference will be held from July 26th to 30th in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
Deadlines: electronic title page due: January 20, 1998 · papers due: January 22, 1998.

ECAI-98:   Thirteenth European Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
The conference will be held from August 23th to 28th in Brighton, UK.
Deadlines: paper summaries due: January 20, 1998 · papers due: January 23, 1998.

ISIC/CIRA/ISAS '98:   International Symposia on Intelligent Control and Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation. The symposia will be held from September 14th to 17th at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA.
Paper submission deadline: February 27, 1998.

AIMSA-98:   Eighth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, Applications. The conference will be held from September 18th to 20th in Sozopol, Bulgaria.
This year's AIMSA focuses on topics like Planning, Temporal Reasoning, Constraint-based Reasoning, Multi-agent Systems, and Knowledge Acquisition, among others.
Submission deadline: April 3, 1998.

16th Workshop of the UK Planning and Scheduling Special Interest Group, organised by Maria Fox, to be held from December 17th to 18th in Durham, UK.

Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation (SARA-98), organised by Tom Ellman, to be held from May 9th to 12th in Pacific Grove, California, USA.
Deadline for the submission of research summaries and extended abstracts is January 20, 1998.

RoboCup, the Robot World Cup Initiative, is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined. For this purpose, RoboCup chose to use the soccer game and organise RoboCup: The Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences. The first RoboCup was held in conjunction with IJCAI-97. All about this competition including final results and forthcoming events can be found via the RoboCup home page.
RoboCup-98 will be held from July 2 - 9 in Paris. RoboCup-98 is the official associate event of The World Cup France 98, the real soccer World Cup to be held in France from June 10 - July 12, 1998.

Planning Systems Competition. The 1998 Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems (AIPS-98:) will host the first planning systems competition. The goal of this competition is to foster development of state-of-the-art planning systems and to encourage the comparison of competing approaches to planning. The competition will be comprised of three tracks, the first two focus on general approaches to operator-based planning for different operator languages and the third one focuses on planners for solving a specific transportation planning domain. More information about the competition, the rules, and the requirements is available at the AIPS-98 home page - click on "Competitions". People who plan to compete should send a short message to planning-contest@isi.edu by January 31, 1998.

This section provides current offers as well as access to sites where relevant jobs are regularly announced. It invites your submissions.

ShivaSoft Inc., a scheduling-software developer in Edmonton, Canada, is currently looking for candidates to fill a research position in intelligent scheduling. They are particularly interested in acquiring more expertise in constraint programming. More about this offer ...

Many job offers in planning, scheduling, and constraint reasoning can be found on this page.

Job openings at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) at the University of Edinburgh are always announced on this page. They include occasional positions and studentships in the Knowledge-Based Planning Group at AIAI.

ShivaSoft Inc.

Research Position - Intelligent Scheduling

ShivaSoft Inc. is a leading developer of advanced planning and scheduling systems for manufacturing companies. The Shiva(tm) system has been successfully installed in numerous large companies in the automotive, metals, repetitive manufacturing, and process industries.

To maintain our technical leadership in a very competitive marketplace we require a highly motivated researcher to join our Edmonton based development team. The position offers an excellent opportunity for those interested in applying academic training to complex manufacturing scheduling models. Demonstrated expertise in the following areas is essential:

- Constraint logic programming
- Genetic algorithms
- Mathematical techniques for optimization
- Hybrid approaches to real scheduling problems

A Ph.D. in a related area of study is preferred. The position also requires:
- Experience in software development and working with software developers
- Good verbal and written communication skills

ShivaSoft's reputation for technical excellence and innovative yet practical solutions is a result of its dedicated personnel and informal, creative atmosphere.
Competitive salary and benefits are offered. This is a permanent position, and opportunities exist for career development in research and other functional areas. ShivaSoft Inc. is an equal opportunity employer.

Send your resume marked "Research" to: HR Manager. e-mail: resume@shivasoft.com, fax: (403) 423 0414
Please direct inquires regarding this position to either vasu@shivasoft.com or john@shivasoft.com.

ShivaSoft Inc.
#455 Phipps McKinnon Building
10020 101A Avenue
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T5J 3G2
URL: http://www.shivasoft.com

J. Christopher Beck, Andrew J. Davenport, Mark S. Fox
Five Pitfalls of Empirical Scheduling Research”, in:
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Constraint Programming (CP-97), 1997.

J. Christopher Beck, Andrew J. Davenport, Edward M. Sitarski, Mark S. Fox
Texture-Based Heuristics for Scheduling Revisited., in:
Proceedings of the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-97), 1997.

J. Christopher Beck, Andrew J. Davenport, Edward M. Sitarski, Mark S. Fox
Beyond Contention: Extending Texture-Based Scheduling Heuristics., in:
Proceedings of the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-97), 1997.

The planning and scheduling papers of IJCAI-97, AAAI-97, and ECAI-96, and the papers of ECP-97 and AIPS-96 are listed in the bibliography of the Electronic Colloquium.