Planning and Plan Execution for Real-World Systems: Principles and Practices (PlanEx)

Download the Online Proceedings

Early approaches to robot control were based on the Sense-Plan-Act (SPA) paradigm with planning as the core of a control-loop. Using this paradigm, real-world applications merging deliberative and reactive decision have made remarkable strides in the last few years. These systems have evolved from the classical concept of three-layered control running off-board, to demonstrate dynamic control of a multitude of platforms using onboard and hybrid mixed-initiative techniques. In the meantime, automated planning techniques have evolved substantially in the areas of modeling, reasoning methods, and search algorithms. Together these advances open up new possibilities for how planning technology can be applied in execution, but also reveal new concerns like the interaction between different decisional components or the possible conflict between decision and environmental reality. The goal of this workshop is to integrate practical experience in fieldedautonomous systems with theoretical and empirical results in automated planning to stimulate new perspectives on the roles and requirements for planning in execution.

The workshop seeks contributions in two key areas. The first is focused on applications of planning in execution dealing with architectural or modeling choices to deal with the dynamic real-world environment. Papers should indicate how the system impacts all stages of application development and deployment. Contributions in this area should elaborate on the rationale underpinning the design and the performance of the resulting system in the field. The second key area is focused on theoretical and empirical results for specific automated planning techniques for on-line use in dynamic and uncertain environments. Contributions in this area should address how and why the methods described might be incorporated into a larger application context.

• Planning and Execution in Agent Architectures
• Plan representation and the impact of solving real-world problems
• Semantics of plan execution and their impact to dealing with uncertainty (temporal, spatial and geometric)
• Decision-theoretic approaches to mission planning and execution
• Bounded (time and space) search techniques which deal with environment uncertainty for plan execution
• Distributed/collaborative planning and execution (in a multi-system environment)
• Planning, Scheduling and Execution in unstructured, unknown or hostile condition
• The role of mixed-initiative planning/execution systems

Accepted Papers

• Variable resolution planning through predicate relaxation
  Moisés Martínez, Fernando Fernández and Daniel Borrajo
• Branched Plans with Execution-Time Choice to Reduce the Costs of Conservative Planning
  Amanda Coles and Andrew Coles
• The Dynamic Controllability of Conditional STNs with Uncertainty
  Luke Hunsberger, Roberto Posenato and Carlo Combi
• On-line Simulation based Planning
  L. G. R. Vianna, Leliane Nunes Barros, K. V. Delgado
• Extended Spectrum Based Plan Diagnosis for Plan-Repair
  Shekhar Gupta
• Knowledge Base for Planning, Execution and Plan Repair
  Thibault Gateau, Gaetan Severac, Charles Lesire, Magali Barbier and Eric Bensana
• Mixed-Initiative Procedure Generation and Modification - the Future of Unmanned Military Systems Guidance?
  Ruben Strenzke, Nikolaus Theißing and Axel Schulte
• A Proposal For A Global Task Planning Architecture Using the RoboEarth Cloud Based Framework
  R.J.M. Janssen, M.J.G. van de Molengraft, M. Steinbuch, D. Di Marco, O. Zweigle and P. Levi

Workshop Schedule

Submission process

We accept submission on the topics listed above and more generally when the topics strongly relates to planning actions and executeds them in a situated environment. A paper can be up to 8 pages or up to 4 for presenting some preleminary work.

Authors should prepare their manuscript according to AAAI formatting guidelines and style. Papers should be submitted by email in PDF format to planex@mbari.org

Important dates

• Submission deadline : April 6th, 2012
• Notification : April 13th, 2012
• Camera ready : April 29th, 2012

Organizers

• David Musliner, SIFT LLC, United States
• Frederic Py, MBARI, United Sates

Program committee

• Mark Boddy, Adventium, United States
• Bradley Clement, JPL, United States
• Paul Morris, NASA Ames Research Center, United States
• Nicola Muscettola, Google, United States
• David Musliner, SIFT LLC, United States (co-chair)
• Andrea Orlandini, IP-CNR, Rome, Italy
• Frederic Py, MBARI, United Sates (co-chair)
• Kanna Rajan, MBARI, United States
• Alessandro Saffiotti, Orebro University, Sweden
• Florent Teichteil, ONERA-CERT, France
• Gerard Verfaille, ONERA-CERT, France