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CALL FOR PAPERS
12th ITALIAN WORKSHOP ON PLANNING AND SCHEDULING

https://ips-2024.unibs.it

Bolzano, Italy, November 25th-26th, 2024
(held in conjunction with AI*IA 2024)
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The 12th ITALIAN WORKSHOP ON PLANNING AND SCHEDULING (IPS-2024) will behosted at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, in occasion of the 23rd Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA 2024), November 25th - 28th, 2024.


Aim
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This workshop aims at bringing together researchers interested in different aspects of planning and scheduling problems, and to introduce new researchers to the community.

Although the primary target of this series of workshops is the Italian community of P&S, the aim is to attract an international gathering, thus expecting contributions and participation from around the world.

Submissions to this event are here solicited. Each contribution will be reviewed by members of a strong international Program Committee. Original and already published papers will be made available via the
workshop web-site (https://ips2024.unibs.it).

Important Dates
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Paper submission: September 22nd, 2024
Notification to authors: October 14th, 2024
Camera-Ready submission: November 18th, 2024
Workshop: November 25th-26th, 2024


Topics of interest
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Applicants are expected to be conducting research in the field of Automated Planning & Scheduling; topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

* Algorithms: Novel planning and scheduling algorithms.

* Applications: Empirical studies of existing planning/scheduling systems; domain-specific techniques; heuristic techniques; user interfaces for planning and scheduling; evaluation metrics for plans/schedules; verification and validation of plans/schedules. Application examples of real world problems are particularly welcomed.

* Architectures: Real-time support for planning/scheduling/control; mixed-initiative planning and user interfaces; integration of planning and scheduling; continuous planning systems; integration of planning/scheduling and Fault Detection Isolation and Recovery (FDIR); planning and scheduling in autonomous systems.

* Environmental and Task Models: Analyses of the dynamics of environments, tasks, and domains with regard to different models of planning and execution; verification and validation of domain models.

* Formal Models: Reasoning about knowledge, action, and time; representations and ontologies for planning and scheduling; search methods and analysis of algorithms; formal characterisation of existing planners and schedulers.

* Intelligent Agency: Resource-bounded reasoning; distributed problem solving; integrating reaction and deliberation.

* Knowledge engineering for planning: domain construction tools and techniques, knowledge elicitation, ontology development

* Learning: Learning in the context of planning and execution; learning new plans and operators; learning in the context of scheduling and schedule maintenance.

* Machine and Deep Learning: Machine and Deep Learning Techniques applied to scheduling and/or planning.

* Memory Based Approaches: Case-based planning/scheduling; plan and operator learning and reuse; incremental planning.

* Reactive Systems: Environmentally driven devices/behaviors; reactive control; behaviors in the context of minimal
representations; schedule maintenance.

* Robotics: Motion and path planning; planning and control; planning and perception, integration of planning and perceptual systems.

* Hybrid Systems: planning with mixed discrete-continuous domains; hybrid systems applications; novel benchmark problems involving hybrid dynamics; hybrid planning domain modeling; plan validation and execution.

* Constraint-based Planning/Scheduling and Control Techniques: Constraint/preference propagation techniques, variable/value ordering heuristics, intelligent backtracking/RMS-based techniques, iterative repair heuristics, etc.

* Coordination Issues in Decentralised/Distributed planning/scheduling: Coordination issues in both homogeneous and heterogeneous systems, system architecture issues, integration of strategic and tactical decision making; collaborative planning/scheduling.

* Iterative Improvement Techniques for Combinatorial Optimisation: Genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, tabu search, neural nets, etc applied to scheduling and/or planning.

* Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research: Comparative studies and innovative applications combining AI and OR techniques applied to scheduling and/or planning.

* Planning/scheduling under uncertainty: Coping with uncertain, ill-specified or changing domains, environments and problems; application of uncertainty reasoning techniques to planning/scheduling, including MDPs, POMDPs, Belief Networks, stochastic programming, and stochastic satisfiability.


Submissions
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All submitted papers will be evaluated by at least two members of the program committee, based on originality, significance, relevance and technical quality. Papers should be formatted according to the CEUR-WS's single-column style (http://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html).

We welcome three categories of paper submission:

* Full papers: (more than 10 pages) These should report work in progress or completed work. Authors of full papers that are accepted by the Programme Committee will be invited to give a talk on the paper.

* Short papers: (up to 9 pages) These should report views or ambitions, or describe problems. The author(s) will be able to discuss the paper informally with others at the workshop and will be invited to give a short presentation on their work.

* Extended abstracts: (up to 2 pages, plus references) To foster the exchange of ideas at IPS, we encourage authors to submit extended abstracts of original work, work-in-progress, or work which has appeared in or is under review at other venues such as AAAI/ICAPS/IJCAI/SOCS. The author(s) will be able to discuss the paper informally with others at the workshop and will be invited to give a short presentation on their work.

Submissions should be single blinded, i.e. authors names should be included in the submissions. Submissions must be made through the EasyChair conference system (https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=ips2024) conference system before the indicated deadline (all deadlines refer to GMT). At least one of the authors should register and take part at the conference to make the presentation. Already published papers must be directly submitted to ivan.serina@unibs.it with email subject "IPS2024 already published paper submission".

IPS proceedings will be published in CEUR Workshop Proceedings series. Together with the AIxIA, the IPS organizing committee is investigating ways to publish the proceedings in a series of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (Springer). An opportunity to publish in this series is given to both short and long papers, provided that the work has not been published before and a proper revision of the content of the paper is done so as to meet LNAI standards. Original accepted papers will be submitted for indexation by: DBLP, Thomson Reuters, EI, SCOPUS, Semantic Scholar and Google Scholar. Note that papers shorter than 5 pages will not be indexed by scopus.


Special Issue
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We are investigating the possibility of a special issue of an international journal.


Organisation Chairs
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Riccardo De Benedictis
Institute for Cognitive Science and Technologies (ISTC)
National Research Council (CNR), Italy

Enrico Scala
Department of Information Engineering
University of Brescia, Italy

Ivan Serina
Department of Information Engineering
University of Brescia, Italy

Elisa Tosello
Embedded Systems (ES) Department
Bruno Kessler Foundation, Italy

Alessandro Umbrico
Institute for Cognitive Science and Technologies (ISTC)
National Research Council (CNR), Italy