IPC 2026 Numeric Track - Preliminary Schedule and Call for Domains
Francesco Percassi
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2026 INTERNATIONAL PLANNING COMPETITION
(IPC 2026)
NUMERIC TRACK
Preliminary Schedule and Call for Domains
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We are delighted to announce that the International Conference on Planning and
Scheduling (ICAPS) 2026 in Dublin will host the next iteration of the numeric
track of the International Planning Competition (IPC).
The objective is to empirically evaluate state-of-the-art planning systems on a
number of benchmark problems. The goals of the IPC are to promote planning
research, highlight challenges in the planning community, and provide new and
interesting problems as benchmarks for future research.
Call for domains instructions
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If you are interested in designing a domain for the competition, or you already
have something to share, please contact us before the Domain submission deadline
(see below). We will then run some checks to see if the domain is suitable for
the IPC, and ask you to think about the ability to easily scale problem difficulty.
If you don't have a domain yourself, but you can think of someone who might have
an interesting planning problem, please share this call with them.
While not necessary, it is desirable for the domains to be related to real
applications. Moreover, if a domain-dependent planner for the submitted domain
is available, please include it in the submission.
We will consider all submissions and select the highest quality subset to be
included. We are aware that participants who submit a domain that is used
have some advantage with respect to performance on that domain. We view this
as a good incentive for teams to submit high-quality proposals.
Since one of the goals of the IPC is to provide a new (publicly available)
set of benchmarks for future research, we plan to publish all domains
selected for IPC 2026 in a public repository. By submitting a domain,
you agree to this and give us the right to do so. We recommend that you
also license your domain under a permissive license such as CC-0 so
that others can use and build on your domain.
If you have a domain in mind, but have doubts about whether it would be
appropriate for the IPC, don't hesitate to contact us!
PDDL fragment and tracks
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We will adopt the same numeric fragment of the last IPC
(see https://ipc2023-numeric.github.io/). That is, we target two fragments of
PDDL2.1 level 1, which are referred to as Simple and Linear Numeric Planning
(SNP and LNP). As you may be well aware, SNP allows linear expressions in
preconditions and goals and restricts actions’ effects to increase or decrease
variables by a constant, while LNP also allows linear expressions in the
right-hand side of actions’ effects. Moreover, actions will have an associated
state-independent non-negative cost, so optimal plans are those where the sum
of action costs is minimal.
We plan to have three different sub-tracks: Optimal, Satisficing, and Agile, depending
on the number and type of submissions received.
Preliminary schedule
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Domain submission deadline: March 31, 2026
Planner submission deadline: May 10, 2026
Planner abstract submission deadline: June 10, 2026
Contest run: May - June, 2026
Results announced: June, 2026
Registration - we will soon share the instructions for the registration
process via email and on the website for the competition
(https://ipc2026-numeric.github.io/).
Luigi Bonassi (luigib...@robots.ox.ac.uk)
Francesco Percassi (f.per...@hud.ac.uk)
Joan Espasa Arxer (je...@st-andrews.ac.uk)
Enrico Scala (enrico...@unibs.it)
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