Call for Contributions
 
 			   WORKSHOP ON PDDL
 
 		 to be held in conjunction with ICAPS 2003
        The International Conference on Automated Planning & Scheduling
          
 		       Trento, Italy, 10 June 2003
 
 
            http://csl.anu.edu.au/~thiebaux/workshops/ICAPS03
 
 
 
 PDDL has become a de facto standard language for describing planning
 domains, not only for the planning competition but more widely, as it
 offers an opportunity to carry out empirical evaluation of planning
 systems on a growing collection of generally adopted standard
 benchmark domains. 
 
 The emergence of a language standard will have an impact on the entire
 field, influencing what is seen as central and what peripheral in the
 development of planning systems. The adoption of PDDL in this role is
 itself an issue for debate: perhaps a completely different modelling
 language is called for.
 
 We believe that it is therefore important to provide a forum in which
 the community can give feedback and present their ideas to the
 language designers, and in which the language designers can discuss
 their ideas for maintaining and extending, or even replacing the
 language. Enabling this discussion and debate is the objective of this
 one day workshop, while setting the stage for an ongoing discussion of
 the future development of PDDL and the standardisation process.
 
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 Issues of interest include, but are not limited to: 
 
 * Assessment of PDDL and comparison with other modelling languages: 
   - adequacy and impact as a domain definition language for planning 
   - adequacy and impact as a planning competition language 
   - missing features and limiting assumptions 
   - alternative planning domain modelling languages 
   - general purpose vs special purpose modelling languages -- 
     embedding of special purpose features into a general purpose language 
   - assessment of and investigations into PDDL+ 
 
 * Proposals for extensions of PDDL, for instance: 
   - to partially observable, non-deterministic, probabilistic domains 
   - to multi-criteria optimisation 
   - to multi-agent domains 
   - to hierarchical planning 
   - web-PDDL, ontologies 
   - PDDL for robot planning 
   - extensions to the definition of a plan - contingencies, 
     iteration, sensing actions and other execution-level features 
 
 * Discussion of the infrastructure supporting PDDL: 
   - what is the ambition for PDDL: a competition standard, 
     a community standard, a research standard or an industry standard? 
   - are we ready to adopt such a standard? 
   - should there be a formal standards committee? 
   - should developments be allowed to branch as expressive power increases? 
   - what tools are required to support wide adoption of PDDL? 
 
 
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 Submission guidelines
 
 Our objective for the workshop is to produce a forum for discussion,
 rather than to focus on a sequence of formal presentations. We
 actively encourage short submissions indicating polemical positions or
 challenges.
 
 Researchers wishing to participate may submit either of the following. 
 
 * Position papers 
 
      describing the authors' opinion about some of the workshop
      issues. These will be refereed by the workshop committee, with
      the aim of gathering papers and participants with conflicting
      opinions for panel discussions.
 
 * Challenge papers 
 
      describing a planning domain of interest or some feature of a
      domain, identifying contender modelling languages, and asking how
      best to model this domain or domain feature. The program
      committee will select a number of challenge papers and organise
      for a group of participants to take on the challenges and present
      the results at the workshop. Authors of challenge papers should
      be prepared to contribute to challenges offered by others.
 
 * Technical papers 
 
      which will be reviewed as such by the program committee (for
      instance on an extension of PDDL, a new modelling language, a
      survey of existing modelling languages and comparison of their
      expressive power, a study of the impact of PDDL on planning
      competition results, etc).
 
 *   Short statements of interest (these will not appear in the proceedings).
 
 Forward electronic submissions (10 pages max. AAAI style) 
 in postscript or PDF format to Sylvie.Thiebaux@anu.edu.au
 
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 Important dates
 
 * Position papers, challenge papers, statements of interest 
   - Submission: February 28, 2002 
   - Notification: March 14, 2002 
 
 * Technical papers 
   - Submission: March 14, 2002 
   - Notification: April 14, 2002 
 
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 Organizing Committee
 
 - Derek Long (co-chair, University of Durham, UK) 
 - Drew McDermott (co-chair, Yale University, USA) 
 - Sylvie Thiebaux (co-chair, The Australian National University, Australia) 
 - Piergiorgio Bertoli (IRST, Italy) 
 - Stephan Edelkamp (University of Freiburg, Germany) 
 - Jeremy Frank (Nasa Ames, USA) 
 - Adele Howe (Colorado State University, USA) 
 - Michael Littman (Rutgers University, USA) 
 - Lee McCluskey (University of Huddersfield, UK) 
 
 
 ----
 Dr Sylvie Thiebaux			http://csl.anu.edu.au/~thiebaux
 Fellow, RSISE				Sylvie.Thiebaux@anu.edu.au
 The Australian National University	Tel: +61 (2) 6125 8678
 Canberra ACT 0200, Australia		Fax: +61 (2) 6125 8651