*** NEW SUBMISSION DEADLINE! ***

Workshop presentation

Timelines are a very natural way of representing how the state of a physical system evolves with time. System evolution is represented via a set of concurrently evolving timelines. Each timeline represents the evolution of a specific state variable. Each variable may have a finite, discrete, or continuous domain of values. Each variable may evolve in a discrete or continuous way, due to instantaneous events occurring at some times or due to natural time evolution. Constraints on and between timelines, either on timeline values or on times of change, represent physical limitations or user requirements on the concurrent system evolution.

This representation is at the basis of many existing planning and scheduling systems, either specific or generic. It has been widely used for the high-level control of fielded systems, that is for planning, scheduling, and controlling activities of space, air, ground, or underwater mobile robots. As opposed to other classical planning systems which focus on actions and their durations, preconditions, and effects, planning and scheduling systems that are based on timelines focus on concurrent system evolutions following actions and time evolution.

The short-term objective of the workshop is to gather people that are working with this kind of representation in order to take stock of what exists and of what remains to be done. The long-term objective would be to reach an agreement on a common timeline representation framework and on a common language, on top of which different algorithms could be developed. Mid-term realistic objectives would be the edition of a book or a special issue of a journal and the creation of a common Web site where any material related to timeline-based planning and scheduling systems (articles, presentations, software, benchmarks . . . ) could be found.

Workshop topics

Workshop topics include, but are not strictly limited to the following ones:

• modeling frameworks and representation languages for timeline-based planning;
• algorithms for reasoning and deciding on timelines;
• management of time and resources in timeline-based planning;
• management of uncertainty in timeline-based planning;
• timeline-based multi-agent planning;
• existing tools for modeling and reasoning on timelines;
• applications of timeline-based planning;
• deployed systems exploiting timeline-based planning;
• interaction between timeline-based planning and other control modules: FDIR, executive . . .
• standardization of interfaces with timeline-based planning.

Workshop format

PSTL is planned to be a full-day workshop. The workshop schedule will be split into three (or four) parts:

1. in the first tutorial part, in the morning, speakers who have been working for many years in the domain of timeline-based planning will be invited to present what has been already done;
2. in the second contribution part, in the afternoon, speakers selected via the classical workshop review process will be invited to present their current work;
3. in the third discussion part, at the end of the afternoon, a discussion will be organized about the main challenges to be addressed and the way the community could get organized to progress more collectively;
4. if the number of contributions is too important to fit a one-day schedule, a fourth poster part would be organized before the discussion part.

Submissions

Two kinds of submission are waited for: full technical papers limited to 8 pages, and position papers limited to 4 pages. All accepted papers, even those that might be presented in the poster session, will appear in the workshop proceedings. It is planned to gather the (extended) best workshop contributions in a journal special issue.

All submissions must be prepared using the AAAI style and instructions (see http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php), and sent by email in PDF format to Gerard.Verfaillie@onera.fr.

Important dates

• Paper submission deadline: April 6th, 2012  *** NEW EXTENDED DEADLINE! ***
• Notification of acceptance: April 30th, 2012
• Camera-ready version deadline: May 11th, 2012

Workshop organizers

• Gerard Verfaillie, ONERA, Toulouse, France
  Gerard.Verfaillie@onera.fr
• Roman Bartak, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
  bartak@ktiml.mff.cuni.cz

Program committee

• Amedeo Cesta, ISTC-CNR, Italy
• Steve Chien, JPL, USA
• Brad Clement, JPL, USA
• Juan Manuel Delfa, ESA, Germany
• Jeremy Frank, NASA Ames, USA
• Simone Fratini, ESA, Germany
• Felix Ingrand, LAAS-CNRS, France
• Nicola Policella, ESA, Germany
• Cedric Pralet, ONERA, France
• Kanna Rajan, MBARI, USA