Heuristics 2011 - Heuristics for Domain-independent Planning

Heuristics for Domain-independent Planning

The aim of this workshop series is to further advance the understanding of the ideas underlying current heuristics, their limitations, and the ways for overcoming them. We seek crisp and meaningful ideas and understanding, rather than incremental improvements ('beating the competition'). Also, rather than merely being interested in the 'largest' problems that current heuristic search planners can solve, we are equally interested in the simplest problems that they can't actually solve well.

Call for papers

Motivation and Goals

The automatic derivation of heuristic estimators to guide the search has become one of the main approaches in domain-independent planning. The approach works: very large problems, with many state variables and operators can be solved in this way, that could not be solved before, and the approach appears to scale up better than others.

The workshop on heuristics for domain-independent planning so far took place in conjunction with ICAPS 2007 and ICAPS 2009, and was very successful both times. Many ideas presented at these workshops have led to contributions at major conferences and pushed the frontier of research on heuristic planning in several directions, both theoretically and practically. The workshops, as well as work on heuristic search that has been published since then, have also shown that there are many exciting open research opportunities in this area. Given the considerable success of the past workshops, we would like to continue holding it biennially.

We look for contributions that would help us understand better the ideas underlying current heuristics, their limitations, and the ways for overcoming them. Contributions do not have to show that a new heuristic or new varia- tion of a known heuristic ’beats the competition’. Above all we seek crisp and meaningful ideas and understanding. Also, rather than merely being interested in the ’largest’ problems that current heuristic search planners can solve, we are equally interested in the simplest problems that they can’t actually solve well.

The workshop series, while having originated mainly in classical planning, is very much open to new ideas on heuristic schemes for more general settings, such as temporal planning, planning under uncertainty and adversarial planning. We also explicitly wish to encourage submission of works, such as machine learn- ing of heuristic functions, that diverge from the wide-spread approach deriving heuristic values by solving relaxations/abstractions of the problem at hand.

Paper Formats Solicited

We welcome technical papers as well as position statements. Papers mixing these two aspects are welcome, too. We particularly welcome descriptions of open problems, approaches that didn’t turn out to perform as expected, or problems that existing techniques do not handle well ? provided in each case that there is something the heuristic search planning community can learn from the presented observation. The papers should be formatted in AAAI style, and range between 2 and 6 pages. See http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php for formatting instructions. Submission will be handled via our EasyChair site at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=hdip11.

As the workshop is not an archival conference, multiple submissions are permitted. Work that is a strict subset of that recently previously published in an archival journal should be presented as a short position statement.

Workshop Format

The workshop is planned to be a full 1-day format, but the precise format is to be decided as a function of the contributions received. We strive to have two types of presentations: long and short (15-20 and 5-10 minutes), and if appropriate a discussion session where the audience members are encouraged to participate.

Organizers

Alan Fern (Oregon State University, OR, USA)
afern-AT-eecs.oregonstate.edu
Patrik Haslum (NICTA and ANU, Canberra, Australia)
patrik.haslum-AT-anu.edu.au
Jörg Hoffmann (INRIA, Nancy, France)
joerg.hoffmann-AT-loria.fr
Michael Katz (Technion, Israel)
mkatz-AT-technion.ac.il
Program Committee

J. Benton, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
Hector Geffner, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
Adele Howe, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Derek Long, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Wheeler Ruml, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA
Vincent Vidal, ONERA, France
Sungwook Yoon, PARC, Palo Alto, CA, USA
Erez Karpas, Technion, Israel