News Journal on Planning and Scheduling

The 5th European Conference on Planning will be held from September 8 - 10 in Durham, United Kingdom. 65 papers have been submitted to this conference and are currently being reviewed. The notification date is July, 15th.
Prior to the conference, the general network meeting of PLANET, the "European Network of Excellence in AI Planning", will be held on September 7th. This meeting will be open to all attendees of ECP.
Detailed information about the Conference Programme will soon be available at the conference Web page.

Various Planning and Scheduling Workshops will be held in conjunction with this year's conferences; no less than four relevant Tutorials are scheduled at IJCAI.

The "Artificial Intelligence in Medicine" Journal is planning to publish a special issue on "AI Planning and Scheduling in Hospital Environment". You'll find a Call for Papers here.

Finally, let me remind you that the ETAI Electronic Journal still invites your paper submissions. For your information, please visit the ETAI entry pages or send email to the area editor.
In addition, announcements and other relevant information for this News Journal are as ever welcome.

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.

AAAI-99:   Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
The conference will be held from July 18th to 22th in Orlando, Florida, USA.

IJCAI-99:   Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
The conference will be held from July 31st to August 6th in Stockholm, Sweden.

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.
Notification: July, 15th.

AIPS-2000:   Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling.
The conference will be held from April 14th to 17th in Breckenridge, CO, USA.
Workshop Proposal Submission Deadline: July 15, 1999.
Conference Paper Submission Deadline: October 31, 1999.

ECAI-2000:   Fourteenth European Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
The conference will be held from August 20th to 25th in Berlin, Germany.
Workshop Proposal Submission Deadline: November 1, 1999.
Tutorial Proposal Submission Deadline: November 1, 1999.

Agent-Based Systems in the Business Context,organised by Pauline Berry, Brian Drabble, Karen Myers, and Peter Jarvis, to be held in conjunction with AAAI-99 on July 19 in Orlando, Florida, USA.

Robot Action Planning, organised by Michael Beetz, Joachim Hertzberg, Malik Ghallab, and David Kortenkamp, to be held in conjunction with IJCAI-99 on July 31 in Stockholm, Sweden.

The Third International Workshop on RoboCup, organised by Manuela Veloso, Hiroaki Kitano, and Enrico Pagello, to be held in conjunction with IJCAI-99 on July 31 and August 1 in Stockholm, Sweden.

Intelligent Workflow and Process Management: The New Frontier for AI in Business , organised by Mamdouh Ibrahim and Brian Drabble, to be held in conjunction with IJCAI-99 on August 1 - 2 in Stockholm, Sweden.

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.

Practical Planning Systems, by Steve Chien and Brian Drabble, to be held at IJCAI-99 on August 1 in Stockholm, Sweden.

Knowledge-based Scheduling, by Steve Chien and Stephen Smith, to be held at IJCAI-99 on August 1 in Stockholm, Sweden.

Recent Advances in AI Planning: A Unified View, by Subbarao Kambhampati, to be held at IJCAI-99 on August 1 in Stockholm, Sweden.

Economically Founded Multiagent Systems, by Tuomas W. Sandholm, to be held at IJCAI-99 on August 2 in Stockholm, Sweden.

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.

Tel: +301-6503196, +301-6503197
Fax: +301-6532175
E-mail: costass@iit.demokritos.gr

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Manuscripts should be typed on good quality paper of uniform size (A4 or 8.5 by 11 inches). Please use one side of the paper only and leave wide margins of at least 3 cm to allow for editorial notes and instructions to the printer. Submit the original and two high-quality copies, and retain a complete, fourth copy. All material should be typed double-spaced, including quotations, notes, bibliography, and figure and table captions.

Classical manuscript style, as described in the present Guides, should be used, i.e. avoid Chicago Style, Vancouver Style, etc. Otherwise your paper will not be accepted for publication. Classical manuscript style (for details, see below):

A title page including the title of the contribution, the author's or authors' name(s), complete address(es), e-mail addresses, fax and telephone numbers; an abstract of about 100 words at the beginning of the article accompanied by a list of a few keywords; consecutively numbered sections with headings, no essays; notes, if necessary, should be indicated in the text by superscript numbers; references (= an alphabetically and chronologically ordered bibliographical list of all books and articles referred to in the paper), which should be placed at the end of the contribution; figure/table legends on separate sheet(s). All manuscript pages, except legend sheets, should be consecutively numbered.

Title page is page No. 1. It should include the name(s) of the author(s), title of the contribution, and full address(es) of the contributor(s) including e-mail, fax and phone.

Abstract and Keywords: On page No. 2. No manuscript will be accepted which does not contain an abstract (of about 100 words) and keywords. Please use the term `Abstract' only, do not use `Summary'.

Symbols: Please do not use rare symbols. Care should be taken that the editor and typesetter can have no doubt about identifying a symbol, and whether it should be capital or lower case, Roman, bold, or italic face, Greek, Gothic, or script, subscript or superscript, etc. Special care should be taken to distinguish between the letter O and zero, the letter l and the number 1, k and kappa, u and mu, v and nu, n and eta, epsilon and elementhood, conjunction sign and universal quantifier, disjunction sign and existential quantifier. The same is required for set-theoretical symbols.

Quotations and quotation marks: Double quotes " " should be used for short direct quotations, e.g.: As Ritchie and Hanna (1984, p. 249) say, "Artificial intelligence is still a relatively young science in which there are still various influences from different parent disciplines (psychology, philosophy, computer science, etc.)". The period appears outside, not inside, of the closing quotation mark because it is not part of the idea quoted. Extensive quotations should be set off in a separate paragraph. Please always indicate the source of your quotations, including page number(s). Single quotes ` ' should be used for words or phrases set off for emphasis, e.g.: The program contains data-structures and `heuristic rules'.

Figures/Tables: Please don't insert figures/tables in the main text, keep them always separate from the text, each on a separate sheet. Figures and tables should be numbered in the order in which they are referred to in the article, one consecutive series for the former (Figure 1, Figure 2, Figure 3, etc.) and another for the latter. Cite each figure i as Fig. i and each table j as Table j at least once in the text, and note the approximate location in the margin of the manuscript page. Only camera-ready figures and tables are accepted, i.e. original drawings, glossy photos or high-quality laser prints but no photocopies.

Captions: Figure and table legends should be collected on a separate sheet or sheets. Please don't write legends on the figure/table sheets themselves.

Notes: References to footnotes should be indicated by superscript numbers.

References (Bibliography): An alphabetically and chronologically ordered list of all and only those works which are referred to in your contribution should be headed `References' or `Bibliography', and placed at the end of the article. Generally, initials should be placed before names. References should be numbered consecutively, numbers placed in square brackets according to the following models:

For a paper in a collection: (1) L.A. Zadeh, Is probability theory sufficient for dealing with uncertainty in AI: a negative view, in: L.N. Kanal and J.F. Lemmer, eds., Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1986) 103-116.

For a book: (2) R. Kowalski, Logic for Problem Solving (North-Holland, New York, 1979).

For a journal article: (3) D.E. Heckerman and E.H. Shortliffe, From certainty factors to belief networks, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 4 (1992) 35-52.

For an unpublished paper: (4) S.E. Fahlman, A system for representing and using real-world knowledge, MIT Technical Report AI-TR 450, Cambridge, MA, 1977.

In the text, references should be made by giving in square brackets the corresponding numer(s), and, if necessary, page number of the quoted text, e.g. ('23!, p. 15), or, Ritchie and Hanna ((18), p. 249) are of the opinion that ....

Permissions: It is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain written permission for quotations from unpublished or published material, from any work still in copyright, and for the reprinting of illustrations or tables from unpublished or copyrighted material.

Reprints: Fifty offprints will be provided free of charge to the (first) author of each contribution. Additional copies may be ordered at charges shown on the reprint price list that is sent to the (first) author.

Copyright: Publishing a paper in Artificial Intelligence in Medicine entails the author's irrevocable and exclusive authorization of Elsevier to be the copyright owner of the published material and to contribute to the widest possible dissemination of information by collecting any sums or considerations for copying, translation and reproduction payable by third parties.

Last update: June 23, 1999
Administrated by Susanne Biundo, University of Ulm, Germany.