News Journal on Planning and Scheduling

The ETAI is no more an electronic journal only! The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which already publishes a number of traditional journals and is well known in particular for its authority to award the Nobel prizes in Physics and in Chemistry each year, has agreed to publish also the paper editions of the ETAI. For the ETAI, cooperation with this prestigious organisation means a significant advancement with respect to formal standing and stability.
Detailed information about the agreement between the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the ETAI can be found here.

The ETAI has been extended by two new areas. They are on Concept Based Knowledge Representation and on Decision and reasoning under Uncertainty, respectively. More information on these areas is available via the ETAI entry page.

Susanne Biundo
(area editor)

Michael Beetz and Henrik Grosskreutz
Causal Models of Mobile Service Robot Behavior

Abstract: Temporal projection, the process of predicting what will happen when a robot executes its plan, is essential for autonomous service robots to successfully plan their missions. This paper describes a causal model of the behavior exhibited by the mobile robot RHINO when running concurrent reactive plans for performing office delivery jobs. The model represents aspects of robot behavior that cannot be represented by most action models used in AI planning: it represents the temporal structure of continuous control processes, several modes of their interferences, and various kinds of uncertainty. This enhanced expressiveness enables XFRM (McD92; BM94), a robot planning system, to predict, and therefore forestall, various kinds of behavior flaws including missed deadlines whilst exploiting incidental opportunities. The proposed causal model is experimentally validated using the robot and its simulator.

Date of Submission:   December 23, 1997

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

Michael Beetz and Henrik Grosskreutz
Causal Models of Mobile Service Robot Behavior

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

IJCAI-99:   Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
The conference will be held from July 31st to August 6th in Stockholm, Sweden.
Deadlines: electronic title page due: January 12, 1999 · papers due: January 14, 1999.

AAAI-99:   Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
The conference will be held from July 18th to 22th in Orlando, Florida, USA.
Deadlines: electronic title page due: January 19, 1999 · papers due: January 20, 1999.

ECP-99:   Fifth European Conference on Planning.
The conference will be held from September 8th to 10th in Durham, UK.
Paper Submission Deadline: May 5, 1999.

ECAI-2000:   Fourteenth European Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
The conference will be held from August 20th to 25th in Berlin, Germany.

Scheduling and Planning meet Real-time Monitoring in a Dynamic and Uncertain World, organised by Abdel-Illah Mouaddib and Thierry Vidal, to be held in conjunction with IJCAI-99 on August 2 in Stockholm, Sweden.
Paper Submission Deadline: March 30, 1999.

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

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.

ETAI TO BE PUBLISHED BY ROYAL SWEDISH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

The Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence has encountered the same issue as other electronic journals: People want them on paper as well. For the individual user, it is fine to download specific articles from a server when she needs them, but it is often felt that there ought to be an issue of paper copies "somewhere". Sometimes the reasons are for backup in disaster scenarios: "What if the Internet crumbles?" - "What if no one can read postscript after the year 2050?", and sometimes the reasons are for prestige or pure nostalgia: "I like to see my paper in print". At the same time, if everyone is able to get the articles free from the net, then who is going to pay for the paper edition?

For the ETAI, this problem has now been solved through an agreement that has just been signed between the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA), the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), and Linköping University (LiU). The following has been agreed:

• The ETAI is published in two editions, namely an electronic edition and a paper edition. The paper edition is published by KVA; the electronic edition by LiU through Linköping University Electronic Press.
• The paper edition is printed in a limited supply, and is distributed free of charge by the KVA to sister academies and other prestigious organizations worldwide.
• The electronic edition will be kept on-line for at least 25 years counting from the date of publication.
• Linköping University hosts the practical work for both the paper and the electronic editions.
• Both the KVA and the ECCAI nominate members to the ETAI policy committee, which oversees the organization of the ETAI and which is also the guarantee that the ETAI maintains the highest scientific standards of publication.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences already publishes a number of traditional journals, including Acta Mathematica and Acta Zoologica. It is well known in particular for its authority to award the Nobel prizes in Physics and in Chemistry each year. With its participation in the ETAI project, the Academy has shown its desire to combine traditional quality with innovation in the field of science.

For the ETAI, this agreement means a significant advancement with respect to formal standing and stability, but it also means that we will be able to benefit from the Academy's expertise with respect to communication in and of science.