Call for Papers: Main Track

ICAPS 2021, the 31st International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, will take place in Guangzhou, China, June 7-12, 2021. ICAPS 2021 will be part of the ICAPS conference series, the premier forum for exchanging news and research results on theory and applications of intelligent planning and scheduling technology. It is as yet too early to determine whether ICAPS 2021 will have the traditional structure, or will have to be taken partly, or wholly on-line. We will keep the community informed as we monitor the pandemic situation. Nevertheless, ICAPS 2021 will take place in some format.

ICAPS 2021 will feature 4 different tracks:

*** Main Track
*** Novel Applications Track
*** Special Track on Robotics
*** Special Track on Planning and Learning


Additionally, the ICAPS program will include demonstrations, workshops, and tutorials, each having separate submission and notification dates, to be announced separately.

The ICAPS 2021 program committee invites paper submissions related to automated planning and scheduling. Relevant contributions include, but are not limited to:

Applications and case studies of planning and scheduling techniques
Uncertainty and stochasticity in planning and scheduling
Partially observable and unobservable domains
Conformant, contingent and adversarial planning
Plan and schedule execution, monitoring and repair
Continuous planning, on-line and real-time domains
Plan recognition, plan management and goal reasoning
Classical planning techniques and analysis
Continuous state and action spaces based planning
Multi-agent and distributed planning
Action model learning, knowledge acquisition and engineering
Learning for planning and scheduling
Human computer interaction for planning and scheduling systems
Mixed initiative planning and scheduling systems
Mixed planning with continuous and discrete actions
Planning and decision support for human-machine teams
Human-aware planning and behavior prediction
Planning for explainable machine learning

Important Dates
We have arranged our schedule to permit revision and resubmission of papers rejected from AAAI 2021.

*** December 11, 2020 Abstracts due (electronic submission)
*** December 18, 2020 Full Papers due (electronic submission, PDF)
*** January 27-29, 2021 Author feedback period
*** February 16, 2021 Notification of acceptance or rejection

The reference timezone for all deadlines is UTC-12. That is, as long as there is still some place anywhere in the world where the deadline has not yet passed, you are on time!

Author Guidelines
Authors may submit long papers (8 pages AAAI style plus up to one page of references) or short papers (4 pages plus up to one page of references). The type of paper must be indicated at submission time. All papers, regardless of length, will be reviewed against the standard criteria of relevance, originality, significance, clarity, soundness, and are expected to meet the same high standards set by ICAPS. Short papers may be of narrower scope, for example by addressing a highly specific issue, or proposing or evaluating a small, yet important, extension of previous work or new idea. Overlength papers will be rejected without review.
Authors making multiple submissions must ensure that each submission has significant unique content. Papers submitted to ICAPS 2021 may not be submitted to other conferences or journals during the ICAPS 2021 review period nor may they be already under review or published in other conferences or journals. We expect that AAAI decisions will be available before the ICAPS abstract submission deadline. If that does not happen, we will make arrangements to permit resubmission. This year, the time gap between submissions to major AI conferences is tighter than usual. We had hoped to be able to both accept submissions of papers rejected from AAAI and enable authors to submit papers rejected from ICAPS to IJCAI 2021. However, the timeline is simply too tight for us to do this and maintain the quality of the ICAPS reviewing process. So while rejected papers from AAAI should have decisions early enough to permit revision and resubmission to ICAPS, we are unable to complete our reviews in time for papers to be resubmitted to IJCAI. Specifically, as the ICAPS 2021 notification date is after IJCAI 2021 full paper submission dates, ICAPS authors will not be allowed to resubmit their papers to IJCAI while they are under review at ICAPS, because of single submission requirements.

Submission Instructions
All submissions will be made electronically, through the EasyChair conference system:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icaps2021
Submitted PDF papers should be anonymous for double-blind reviewing, adhere to the page limits of the relevant track CFP/submission type (long or short), and follow the AAAI author kit instructions for formatting:
https://www.aaai.org/Publications/Templates/AuthorKit21.zip
In addition to the submitted PDF paper, authors can submit supplementary material (videos, technical proofs, additional experimental results) for their paper. Please make sure that the supporting material is also anonymized. Papers should be self-contained; reviewers are encouraged, but not obligated, to consider supporting material in their decisions.

Contact
For inquiries contact: ICAPS2021@easychair.org

Susanne Biundo
Robert P. Goldman
Michael Katz

ICAPS 2021 Program Chairs