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           FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS 

The 18th Workshop of the UK Planning and Scheduling Special
Interest Group

       http://www.salford.ac.uk/planning/PLANSIG99

December 15-16, 1999 

University of Salford, Salford (United Kingdom)

The 1999 workshop of the U.K. Planning and Scheduling
Special Interest Group (organised by the University of
Salford) will be held at The Manchester Business School in
Manchester, UK.  The workshop is an annual 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.

Topic of interest include:

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.

Planning and Perception: integration of planning and
perceptual systems.

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.

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.

ATTENDANCE

Anyone with an interest in Planning and Scheduling is
welcome - it is not necessary to submit a paper in order to
attend.

REGISTRATION

The Registration fee (which will be approximately 80 UK
pounds) will include attendance at the Workshop on December
15th and 16th, lunch and morning and afternoon tea/coffee,
and a copy of the Proceedings (ISSN 1368-5708).

ACCOMMODATION

Accommodation will be available at The Manchester Business
School, which is a 5-10 minute walk from the centre of
Manchester.  The Manchester Business School may be contacted
at:

Manchester Business School,
Booth Street West,
Manchester, M15 6PB,
England, U.K.

Tel: +44 (0)161 275 6333
Fax: +44 (0)161 275 6489

SUBMISSIONS

Format of submissions:

(i) 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.

(ii) 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 presentation of their
work.

Three hard copies of papers should be sent to the Programme
Chair to arrive no later than September 17th, 1999.
Alternatively, papers can be submitted before this date via
email, as compressed and uuencoded postscript files, named
author.ps, or ascii text files, named author.txt, in both
cases using the name of the first author.

All submissions will be reviewed by two referees, and
successful submissions will appear in the Workshop
Proceedings. Also, accepted papers submitted in HTML format
will be made available via the SIG website.

Submissions and inquiries should be sent to:

Ruth Aylett,
18th UK Planning and Scheduling SIG,
Centre for Virtual Environments,
Business House,
University of Salford,
Salford,
M5 4WT, UK.

tel: +44 161 295 2922
email: [log in to unmask]

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

   * Programme Chair: Ruth Aylett, University of Salford, UK
   * Tim Chippington Derrick, ILOG, UK
   * Roberto Desimone, DERA, Malvern, UK
   * Maria Fox, Durham University, UK
   * Tim Grant, Origin (Technical Automation/Command and
     Control), The Netherlands
   * Peter Jarvis, AIAI
   * Gerry Kelleher, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
   * Lee McCluskey, Huddersfield University, UK
   * Louise Pryor, Harlequin Ltd, UK
   * Patrick Prosser, University of Strathclyde, UK
   * Sam Steel, Essex University, UK
   * Mark Wallace, IC-PARC, Imperial College London, UK

IMPORTANT DATES

   * Deadline for submission: September 17th, 1999
   * Notification of acceptance sent to authors by email:
     October 29th, 1999
   * Final copy of paper due: November 19th, 1999
   * Deadline for registration: November 19th, 1999


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