SPARK 2015 - Scheduling and Planning Applications woRKshop

Application domains that contain planning and scheduling (P&S) problems pose a combination of issues, from modelling to technological to institutional, that present challenges to the AI planning and scheduling community. New domains and real-world problems are becoming increasingly affordable for AI. The international Scheduling and Planning Applications woRKshop (SPARK) series was established to help address the gap between developments in the AI P&S community and application of these advances.
Workshop Aim
The workshop aims to provide a stable forum on relevant topics connected to application-focused research and the deployment of P&S systems. The immediate legacy began in 2007 with the ICAPS'07 Workshop on Moving Planning and Scheduling Systems into the Real World, and continued in 2008-2014 with successful yearly editions.
The websites of the previous editions of the workshop series are available at http://decsai.ugr.es/~lcv/SPARK/. These workshops presented a stimulating environment where researchers could discuss the opportunity and challenges in moving P&S developments into practice, and analyze domains and problem instances under study for, or closely inspired by, real industrial/commercial deployment of P&S techniques.
This is the 9th edition of SPARK. The previous editions saw substantial attendance with respect to other collocated events (about 30+ people every year since 2007). This success, together with the recent creation of the Novel Applications track at ICAPS make SPARK:
The ideal incubator to test, discuss, mature and improve potential papers for that main track with the feedback of an excellent audience
A great place for the inception of new applications and challenges
The challenges and discussions that emerged in the last years' editions set the baseline for this year's SPARK workshop. A goal of the workshop series is the definition of a longer term set of challenges that could be of benefit for the research community as well as practitioners.
Authors of accepted papers will be encouraged to share their domains and instances, or parts of them, towards a library of practical benchmarking problems that could also be useful for the community.
The best papers from SPARK'07 and '08 were invited to a special issue of the journal Computational Intelligence. Discussions for SPARK'09 and '10 papers are in progress. Higher quality papers from the 2011 edition will be similarly invited to a journal special issue or post-proceedings volume.