Epistemic Planning Competition @IPC -- Call for Planners

[Alessandro Burigana]

[Apologies for cross-posting]

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                    2026 INTERNATIONAL PLANNING COMPETITION                  
                            EPISTEMIC PLANNING TRACK

                               CALL FOR PLANNERS                              

             https://sites.google.com/view/epistemic-competition/            
                        eplanning....@gmail.com                      

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We are delighted to announce the first Epistemic Planning track of the
International Planning Competition (IPC-26), hosted at the ICAPS 2026 conference
in Dublin. We invite researchers and practitioners in automated planning,
epistemic reasoning, and multi-agent systems to participate and to share this
call to all interested parties. The goals of the track are to promote epistemic
planning research, highlight challenges in the epistemic planning community, and
provide new and interesting problems as benchmarks for future research.

We welcome all interested researchers, students, developers, and practitioners
from any research area connected to epistemic planning. Relevant research fields
include, but are not limited to:
 - Automated Planning;
 - (Dynamic) Epistemic Logic;
 - Knowledge Representation and Reasoning;
 - Neuro-symbolic Reasoning; and
 - Multi-Agent Systems.

The competition will be based on a novel language called the Epistemic Planning
Domain Definition Language, or EPDDL. A complete guideline for the language is
available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20969. To facilitate the
participation to a greater number of people, we also developed a full-fledged
parser/grounder for EPDDL and a basic planner available to everyone to build on
top of. Information can be found in the competition website linked above.

The competition is expected to encourage contributions that reflect current
approaches and practices in epistemic planning. Authors of selected entries will
be invited to provide written contributions which will be collected and
published in the proceedings of the track.

Below we provide the general information to compete in the epistemic planning
track. For all details on the structure of the track and planners evaluation
policies, please consult the official website of the track:
 - https://sites.google.com/view/epistemic-competition/


----- Important Dates -----

| Event/Deadline                       | Date (AoE)         |
|--------------------------------------| ------------------ |
| Demo problems provided (smoke tests) | February, 2026     |
| Team registration                    | March 12, 2026     |
| Domains submission                   | March 19, 2026     |
| Domain submission deadline           | April 23, 2026     |
| Feature stop (final submission)      | April 30, 2026     |
| Planner abstract submission          | May 21, 2026       |
| Contest run                          | May - June, 2026   |
| Results announced                    | During ICAPS (TBA) |


----- Registration and Submission -----

To register a team, the participants need to send an e-mail with a subject
containing "Registration" to eplanning....@gmail.com. The
e-mail must contain:
 1. Names of participants,
 2. E-mail contacts,
 3. GitHub usernames.

Based on that, we will create private repositories under the ipc2026-epistemic
organization and add all participants as users with write access and
participants can commit to the repository as they wish until the "feature stop"
deadline (April 30, 2026).

The competitors must submit the source code of their planners that will be run
by the organizers on the actual competition domains/problems.

As in the previous IPC 2023, we will use the container technology Apptainer. We
prepared a demo submission, available at
https://github.com/a-burigana/plank/blob/main/Apptainer.demo_bfs, that showcases
how to set up the repository and Apptainer scripts.

More information about the submission policy can be found in the website.


----- Planner Abstract Submission -----

All competitors must submit an abstract (max. 300 words) and an up to 8-page
paper describing their planners. After the competition we ask the participants
to analyze the results of their planner and submit a finalized version of their
paper to be published in the proceedings of the track. An important requirement
for IPC 2026 competitors is to give the organizers the right to post their paper
and the source code of their planners on the official IPC 2026 web site.


----- Contacts and Info -----

Organizers:

 - Alessandro Burigana

 - Francesco Fabiano

Website:
 - https://sites.google.com/view/epistemic-competition/