Final call for papers and deadline extension to April 2: Workshop on the International Planning Competition (WIPC 2024)

[Jendrik Seipp]

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                       CALL FOR PAPERS

ICAPS 2024 Workshop on the International Planning Competition (WIPC)

Website: https://icaps24.icaps-conference.org/program/workshops/wipc/
Contact: wipc...@googlegroups.com

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The International Planning Competition (IPC) is held every few years in
the context of ICAPS. It empirically evaluates 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. The IPC has an important role in the ICAPS community,
being a forum to compare different algorithmic ideas and
implementations, and setting standards for research and evaluation in
the area.

Similar to the lineage of IPC workshops organised at ICAPS 2003, 2007,
2012, 2015, and 2019 this workshop aims to review the current status of
the IPC, analyze the results of the last IPC (2023), and provide a venue
for discussing aspects that will be helpful for preparing forthcoming
competitions.


# Topics

Topics include, but need not be limited to:
* Past, present and future of the IPC
* Tracks: Proposing new and/or revising the current tracks
* Domain Definition Languages: benefits and limitations. Should larger
subsets of PDDL or RDDL be considered in next editions of the IPC?
Should the input languages evolve in some way?
* Benchmark Domains: Discussion/Analysis of existing domains. Are IPC
benchmarks a good standard for evaluation of planners?  How should
instances be chosen for the competition?
* Evaluation Metrics: Should we adapt the metrics used for evaluating
the performance of planners? How should the winners of the competition
be decided?
* Results: interpretation of past results, new ideas about how to
analyze/compare the performance of planners beyond the score of the
competition.
* Rules: Should portfolios be given a special treatment? Should there be
any limits on re-using code from others?
* Tools: Can we automate large parts of the IPC to make organising an
IPC track easier?


# Submissions

We encourage submissions in three formats. All submissions should be
accompanied by a paper in AAAI style
(https://www.aaai.org/Publications/Templates/AuthorKit23.zip). In all
tracks you can choose the length of your submission freely between 1-8
pages + one page for references. Please choose a length appropriate for
the format of your submission.
* long presentations have a ~20 minute slot, including discussions. We
expect most papers for this format will make use of all 8 pages.
* short presentations have a ~10 minute slot, including discussions. We
expect the average paper in this format will have around 4 pages.
* very short presentations have a ~5 minute slot, including discussion. 
We expect submissions to consist of an idea that can be presented on 1-2
slides but lead to some discussion, like a suggestion for a new track or
metric. Submissions in this track should consist of a title and
abstract, so no PDF submission is required (though it is also welcomed).

(We will adjust the length of the time slots according to the number of
accepted papers.)

As suggested by the list of topics, we encourage the submission of
position papers as well as other submissions that do not fit the mold of
a typical conference paper.

Paper Submissions should be made through OpenReview:

https://openreview.net/group?id=icaps-conference.org/ICAPS/2024/Workshop/WIPC

The review process will be single blind for reviewers and double blind
for the general public. All reviews of accepted papers will be made
public via the OpenReview system.

Please be aware of OpenReview's moderation policy for newly created
profiles:
  * New profiles created without an institutional email will go through
a moderation process that can take up to two weeks.
  * New profiles created with an institutional email will be activated
automatically.


# Deadline and Dates

Submission deadline: April 2
Notification: April 8
Camera Ready: April 22
Workshop: June 2/3


# Organizers

Florian Pommerening (University of Basel)
Jendrik Seipp (Linköping University)
Javier Segovia-Aguas (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Ayal Taitler (University of Toronto)
Enrico Scala (University of Brescia)
Joan Espasa (University of St Andrews)
Ron Alford (MITRE)
Daniel Fišer (Saarland University)