6th International Planning Competition
Call for Participation (Deterministic Part)
The International Planning Competition (IPC) is a biennial event organized in the context of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), which has several goals, including analyzing and advancing the state of the art in automated planning systems; providing new data sets to be used by the research community as benchmarks for evaluating different approaches to automated planning; emphasizing new research issues in planning; promoting the acceptance and applicability of planning technology.
The deterministic part of IPC is the oldest one (the other two parts of IPC-2008 are the planning with uncertainty part and the planning with learning part); its 6th recurrence will run in 2008 and conclude together with ICAPS, in September 2008, in Sydney. This time it is organized by Minh Do, Malte Helmert and Ioannis Refanidis.
IPC-2008 will be based on PDDL 3, i.e. the same language used in IPC-2006, with the introduction of a multivalued representation (to be used optionally) being the only extension. There will be different tracks involving various subsets of PDDL3.0. A competing team may participate for any track. However, the competitors are strongly encouraged to participate in every track supported by their planners. The tracks will be announced on the website of IPC-2008.
Special attention will be given on defining an evaluation schema precisely, in the form of an algorithm, that can also be used outside the competition. The precise evaluation criteria will be known to the competitors well ahead of time (see schedule below), in order to prepare their planners accordingly. For some tracks, a separate prize will be given to optimal planners.
The evaluation process will comprise two phases: Initially, the competitors will be given a set of representative domain/problem instances to test their planners on their own machines. Then, they will submit a final version of the source code of their planners that will be run by the organizers on the actual competition domains/problems (unknown to the competitors till this time). This way no fine-tuning of the planners will be possible.
All competitors must submit a 4-page paper describing their planners. A booklet with the papers (possibly electronic) will be distributed among the ICAPS 2008 participants.
Finally, an important requirement for IPC-2008 competitors is to give the organizers the right to post the code of their planners on the official IPC-2008 web site.
Registration and Schedule
Each competitor should register by sending an email to the competition chair including the filled in registration form available from here. The registration deadline is FEBRUARY 29, 2008.
The tentative schedule of the competition activities is:
(Schedule removed. Find an up to date version on the home page.)
We are looking forward to a fascinating competition!
The organizers,
Minh Do, Malte Helmert, Ioannis Refanidis