------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PLANSIG 2000: The 19th Workshop of the UK PLANNING AND SCHEDULING Special Interest Group ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Open University Milton Keynes, England Thursday 14th & Friday 15th December, 2000 Home Page: http://mcs.open.ac.uk/plansig2000 Call for Papers **************** The new Millennium's first Workshop of the UK Planning and Scheduling Special Interest Group will be held at the Open University campus in Milton Keynes, UK. The workshop is a yearly forum where academics, industrialists and research students can meet and discuss current issues in an informal setting. We especially aim to bring together researchers attacking different aspects of planning and scheduling problems, and to introduce new researchers to the community. In recent years the SIG has attracted an international gathering, and we continue to welcome contributions from around the world. SCOPE Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): Applications: empirical studies of existing planning/scheduling systems; domain-specific techniques; heuristic techniques; user interfaces for planning and scheduling. Architectures: real-time support for planning/scheduling/control; mixed-initiative planning and user interfaces. Environmental and task models: analyses of the dynamics of environments, tasks, and domains with regard to different models of planning and execution. Formal Models: reasoning about knowledge, action, and time; representations and ontologies for planning and scheduling; search methods and analysis of algorithms; formal characterisation of existing planners and schedulers. Intelligent Agency: resource-bounded reasoning; distributed problem solving; integrating reaction and deliberation. Learning: learning in the context of planning and execution; learning new plans and operators; learning in the context of scheduling and schedule maintenance. Memory Based Approaches: case-based planning/scheduling; plan and operator learning and reuse; incremental planning. Reactive Systems: environmentally driven devices/behaviours; reactive control; behaviours in the context of minimal representations; schedule maintenance. Robotics: Motion and path planning; planning and control; planning and perception, integration of planning and perceptual systems. Constraint-based Planning/Scheduling and Control Techniques: constraint/preference propagation techniques, variable/value ordering heuristics, intelligent backtracking/RMS-based techniques, iterative repair heuristics, etc. Coordination Issues in Decentralised/Distributed planning/scheduling: coordination issues in both homogeneous and heterogeneous systems, system architecture issues, integration of strategic and tactical decision making. Iterative Improvement Techniques for Combinatorial Optimisation: genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, tabu search, neural nets, etc applied to scheduling and/or planning. Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research: comparative studies and innovative applications combining AI and OR techniques, applied to scheduling and/or planning. SUBMISSIONS Format of submissions: Full papers: (approx. 5000 words). These should report work in progress or completed work. Authors of full papers which are accepted by the Programme Committee will be invited to give a talk on the paper. Short papers: (2 pages) These should report views or ambitions, or describe problems. The author(s) will be able to discuss the paper informally with others at the workshop and may be invited to give a short (poster) presentation on their work. Possible methods of submission: Hard copy: three hard copies of papers should reach the Programme Chair by the 17th September, 2000. Electronic: papers can be submitted via e-mail or made available on the Web. In both cases, documents should be in gzipped postscript format and be named "author.ps.gz", using the name of the first author. An e-mail message containing either the file or its URL (e.g. http://..../author.ps.gz) should reach the Programme Chair by the 17th September 2000. All submissions will be reviewed by two referees, and successful submissions will appear in the Workshop Proceedings (ISSN 1368-5708). Also, accepted papers submitted in HTML format will be made available via the SIG web-site. ATTENDANCE Anyone with an interest in Planning and Scheduling is welcome - it is not necessary to submit a paper in order to attend. Although this is the Workshop of the UK Planning & Scheduling SIG, a warm invitation is extended also to researchers from outside the UK to submit a paper, or otherwise attend. REGISTRATION The deadline for registration is 13th November 2000 (further details will be available from http://mcs.open.ac.uk/plansig2000 nearer the time). PROGRAMME COMMITTEE Ruth Aylett Salford University, UK Edmund Burke University of Nottingham, UK Maria Fox Durham University, UK Tim Grant Origin (Technical Automation/Command and Control), NL Peter Jarvis SRI International, USA Gerald Kelleher Liverpool John Moores University, UK Derek Long Durham University, UK Lee McCluskey Huddersfield University, UK Geoff McKeown University of East Anglia, UK Patrick Prosser University of Glasgow, UK Barry Richards IC-PARC, Imperial College London, UK Sam Steel Essex University, UK Programme Chair: Max Garagnani, The Open University, UK Submissions and inquiries should be sent to the Programme Chair at the following address: Max Garagnani 19th UK Planning and Scheduling SIG, Department of Computing Faculty of Mathematics and Computing The Open University Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA United Kingdom Tel. +44 (0)1908 654812 (direct) Tel: +44 (0)1908 652348 (secr.) Fax: +44 (0)1908 652140 E-mail: [log in to unmask] IMPORTANT DATES Deadline for submission: September 17th, 2000 Notification of acceptance sent to authors by email: October 22nd, 2000 Final copy of paper due: November 5th, 2000 Deadline for registration: November 13th, 2000 PLANSIG 2000: December 14-15, 2000 ****************************************************************