IPC 2026 Numeric Track - Registration and Planner Submission

[Luigi Bonassi]

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to invite registrations and planner submissions for the numeric track of the 2026 International Planning Competition. Please find further information below.

Registration
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We require that a planner is registered through a team. For this, you need to send an email with a subject containing “[Registration for Numeric Tracks]” to either f.per...@hud.ac.uk or luigib...@robots.ox.ac.uk, and include the other address in CC. The email must contain:

names of participants, email contacts, track (agile/satisficing/optimal), and at least one GitHub account. For further details about the tracks and deadlines, please refer to the website: https://ipc2026-numeric.github.io.
Based on that, we will create a private repository under the ipc2026-numeric organisation and grant all participants write access. Participants will be able to upload their planners and commit changes to the repository as needed until the planner submission deadline (May 10, 2026).

Planner submission
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Competitors must submit the source code of their planners. The organisers will run the planners on the competition domains and problems, which will remain unknown to competitors until the evaluation phase. This prevents any fine-tuning of planners to the final benchmark set. Planner repositories will be hosted by the organisers on GitHub under the ipc2026-numeric organisation. These repositories will remain private until the end of the competition, after which they will be made public. Once the competition is concluded, we plan to make all planners, domains, and related data available from a single location.

We require participants to provide self-contained code, with scripts for compilation and running, “compile” and “run”, respectively. Each run script should specify which track the planner should be included in and the supported numeric fragment. Multiple configurations for the same track or fragments are allowed. An example of how to structure your repository and which scripts to include can be found here: https://github.com/ipc2026-numeric/baseline. Should there be any questions about the planner submission, feel free to contact us.

Configurations for SNP will be evaluated only on SNP domains, while LNP configurations will be run on the entire benchmark set.

We are still investigating the execution environment for the experiments, including the possible adoption of a container platform such as Apptainer (formerly Singularity). In the meantime, participants may assume that planners must compile on a fresh installation of Ubuntu 20.04 / 22.04 LTS. Further details will be provided soon.
The planner must be executable through a script that takes exactly three input parameters, in the following order: the domain file, the problem file, and the name of the file where the last solution found will be saved. The output plan must follow the standard IPC solution format, consisting of a list of actions separated by a new line.

For any questions, feel free to contact any of the organisers.

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)