ICKEPS

Competition date: June 25th, 2012

Overview

The International Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling has been running since 2005 as a bi-annual event promoting the development and importance of the use of knowledge engineering methods and techniques within P&S. 

Past events include 3 competitions (ICKEPS) interleaved with 3 workshops (KEPS), all held during ICAPS conferences: ICKEPS'05 (San Francisco, June 2005), ICKEPS'07 (Providence, September 2007), KEPS'08 (Sydney, September 2008), ICKEPS'09 (Thessaloniki, Greece, September 2009), KEPS'10 (Toronto, May 2010) and KEPS'11 (Freiburg, June 2011).

This year the competition aims at focusing on the Knowledge Engineering process “as a whole”: tools and techniques that encompass and support the main design phases of a planning domain model. We would like to encourage developers to present tools that support all or some of the following phases:

1. Elicitation & Modeling
2. Model Validation & Verification
3. Plan/Schedule Analysis 

Format

The competition has two main tracks:

• Design Process Track. This track aims at general and specific tools that support all or some of the three mentioned phases.
  1. General tools: Tools for the general track will be evaluated (in all phases or in a subset of them) for generic, domain-independent P&S. Competitors will have to demonstrate advantages of their tools in supporting KE for generic P&S approaches.
  2. Specific tools: Tools for the specific track will be evaluated in a  specific applicative area. Competitors will have to demonstrate advantages of their tools in P&S for the specific area they apply and how they support the the design phases.
• Challenge Track. This track aims at providing competitors challenging Planning & Scheduling problems from industry partners so they can use their tools and creativity to come up with a design solution. Specifications of 3 challenging P&S problems are available (a set of scenarios is provided). Competitors must show their interest in solving at least one the available problems. Competitors will have to demonstrate the advantage of using their tools/method to produce a P&S model as a solution to the requirements (or a sub-set of) in the specification and the plans for the specified scenarios. Tools for the challenge track will be evaluated on the applicative domain they choose among those provided by industrial partners.
   

Design Process Track

Competitors (Accepted papers)

EUROPA: A Platform for AI Planning, Scheduling, Constraint Programming, and Optimization
Javier Barreiro, Matthew Boyce, Jeremy Frank, Michael Iatauro, Tatiana Kichkaylo, Paul Morris, Tristan Smith, Minh Do

FlowOpt: Bridging the Gap Between Optimization Technology and Manufacturing Planners
Roman Barták, Milan Jaška, Ladislav Novák, Vladimír Rovenský, Tomáš Skalický, Martin Cully, Con Sheahan, Dang Thanh-Tung

MARIO: Knowledge Engineering for Planning-based Data-flow Composition
Mark D. Feblowitz, Anand Ranganathan, Anton V. Riabov, Octavian Udrea

Challenge Track 

Domains 

We have gathered interesting and challenging P&S problems from industry partners. Competitor should model and solve these problems using their tools. The following links provide the specification documents and the input data for each one of the available challenging problem. Here are the challenges for this year:

• SACE Domain: Planning Solar Array Operations on the International Space Station
• Petrobras Domain: Planning Ship Operations on Petroleum Platforms and Ports
• MEX Domain: Planning Operations on the Mars Express Mission

Competitors

• Team MATFYZ - Roman Barták, Jan Jelinek, Martin Kolombo, Martin Pecka, Martin Hanes, Daniel Toropila, Filip Dvorak, Ota Trunda
• Team APSI - Simone Fratini, Nicola Policella, Angelo Oddi, Riccardo Rasconi

Proceedings

The ICKEPS 2012 proceedings will be available after the conferenceand will include the papers, problem specifications and the report.

June 27th, 2012

Evaluation criteria

The winners of the competition will be decided by a board of judges after a careful evaluation of both paper presentation and demonstration of the tools. In addition, partners will participate in the evaluation of the solutions presented in the Challenge Track. Both Software Engineering (SE) issues and P&S issues will be taken in account.

• Portability, meant as a measurement of the "difficulty of using the tool out of the laptop of the competitor" (Design Process track).
• Robustness, meant as a measurement of how much is the tool sensible to the domain in use (general tools) or how much is the tool sensible to the specific problem in the applicative are (specific tools).
• Usability, meant as a measurement of how much is the tool usable either by AI experts  or target domain experts.
• Spread of use of the tool. (How many people so far have used the tool? To do what?)
• Perceived added value for the P&S community (general tools) or to the application area (specific tools). This is meant to be an evaluation of the impact of the tool. 
• Flexibility. How would be easy to use the tool for domains out of those foreseen  by the authors? (general tools) How demanding is to extend the set of problems that it is possible to cope with? (specific tools)

• Originality. Is the approach original (with respect to previous proposals by other authors)?
• Comprehensiveness. Is the sub-set of the domains/problems that can be used well defined? Is the chosen subset enough for targeting significant issues in the application community? 
• The challenges involved in the covered phases.
• Connection with the P&S technology. Is the tool a comprehensive KE tool? Is there any available useful translation of output plan or schedule back into the application domain? Is there any feature available to interact with the planner/scheduler?
• Availability of solvers to input the translated domain model and performances of the planner and/or schedule (when available) with the translated domains.

Organizers

Tiago Stegun Vaquero (University of Toronto)
Contact: tvaquero (AT) mie.utoronto.ca

Simone Fratini (European Space Agency)
Contact: simone.fratini (AT) esa.int

Programme Committee

• Roman Barták, Charles University, Czech Republic 
• Mark Boddy, Adventium Labs, USA
• Adi Botea, NICTA/ANU, Australia
• Luis Castillo, IActive Intelligent Solutions, Spain
• Amedeo Cesta, ISTC-CNR, Italy
• Bradley Clement, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA
• Stefan Edelkamp, Universität Dortmund, Germany 
• Susana Fernández, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
• Antonio Garrido, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain
• Robert Goldman, SIFT, USA
• Arturo González-Ferrer, University of Haifa, Israel
• Rania Hatzi, Harokopio University of Athens, Greece
• Lee McCluskey, University of Huddersfield, UK
• Nicola Policella, ESA, Germany
• Julie Porteous, University of Teeside, UK

Judges

• Tiago Stegun Vaquero, University of Toronto, Canada
• Simone Fratini, ESA, Germany
• Lee McCluskey, University of Huddersfield, UK

Previous competitions

• 1st ICKEPS (2005)
• 2nd ICKEPS (2007)
• 3rd ICKEPS (2009)