KEPS: Deadline extension to 30/06

[Mauro Vallati]

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Due to popular demand, the KEPS deadline has been extended to 30/06 -- you have 10 more days to polish your super-duper paper. We can't wait to read it! 

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Workshop on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (KEPS) at ICAPS 2025

Melbourne, Australia
November 2025
https://icaps25.icaps-conference.org/program/workshops/keps/

Aim and Scope of the Workshop

Despite the progress in automated planning and scheduling systems, these systems still need to be fed by carefully engineered domain and problem descriptions and they need to be fine-tuned for particular domains and problems. Knowledge engineering for AI planning and scheduling deals with the acquisition, design, validation and maintenance of domain models, and the selection and optimization of appropriate machinery to work on them. These processes impact directly on the success of real-world planning and scheduling applications. The importance of knowledge engineering techniques is clearly demonstrated by a performance gap between domain-independent planners and planners exploiting domain-dependent knowledge.

The workshop will continue the tradition of several International Competitions on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (ICKEPS) and prior KEPS workshops. Rather than focusing only on software tools and domain encoding techniques---which are topics of ICKEPS---the workshop will cover all aspects of knowledge engineering for AI planning and scheduling.

Topics of Interest

We seek original papers ranging from experience reports to the description of new technology in the following areas:
Formulation of domains and problem descriptions
Methods and tools for the acquisition of domain knowledge
Pre- and post-processing techniques for planners and schedulers
Acquisition and refinement of control knowledge
Formal languages for describing domains
Re-use of domain knowledge
Translators from other application area-specific languages to solver-ready domain models (such as PDDL)
Formats for the specification of heuristics, parameters and control knowledge for solvers
Import of domain knowledge from general ontologies
Ontologies for describing the capabilities of planners and schedulers
Automated reformulation of problems
Automated knowledge extraction processes
Domain model, problem and plan validation
Visualization methods for domain models, search spaces and plans
Mapping domain properties and planning techniques
Plan representation and reuse
Knowledge engineering aspects of plan analysis
Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: June 30, 2025 (UTC-12 time zone)
Notification: July 31, 2025
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!

Submission Details

Two types of papers can be submitted. Full technical papers with the length up to 8 pages + 1 for references, are standard research papers. Short papers with the length between 2 and 4 pages (+1 for references) describe either a particular application or focus on open challenges. All papers must be submitted in a PDF format and must conform to the ICAPS 2025 author kit instructions for formatting: https://icaps25.icaps-conference.org/files/icaps2025-author-kit.zip 

The submission will be done via ChairingTool: https://chairingtool.com/conferences/keps25/main-track?role=author  (yes, read again, it is not EasyChair!)

Policy on Previously Published Materials

We are pleased to accept papers based on recent publications from other (non-ICAPS) venues such as specialized conferences (AAMAS, ICRA, KR, ...), or general AI conferences (AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, ...). Such submissions must be clearly indicated in the paper.

Submissions of papers being reviewed at other venues are welcome since this is a non-archival venue and we will not require a transfer of copyright. If such papers are currently under blind review, please anonymize the submission.

Organising Committee
Lukas Chrpa, Czech Technical University
Ron Petrick, Heriot-Watt University
Mauro Vallati, University of Huddersfield
Tiago Vaquero, NASA JPL