From: Martin Mueller CS UALBERTA CA> Date: 4 feb 2002 Subject: AIPS-02 Workshop on Planning and Scheduling with Multiple Criteria Hello, this announcement may only be of interest for a few of you. It is about planning with multiple criteria, which sounds like a useful idea in a complex game such as Shogi. Martin AIPS-02 Workshop on Planning and Scheduling with Multiple Criteria Toulouse, France, April 23-27 2002 http://www.csd.auth.gr/~lpis/aips02 Sponsored by PLANET Call for Papers/Participation Most real-world problems demand the consideration of many criteria, such as plan duration, resource consumption, profit, safety etc, either separately, or in some combination. In the former case the plans are optimized for a single criterion and the other criteria are handled as constraints, whereas in the latter case the plans are optimized with respect to an arbitrary combination of the criteria. In many cases the criteria are in conflict and a trade off must be identified. For example, in a manufacturing domain the criteria may be to maximize the work in progress (to maximize the number of orders fulfilled) and minimize inventory (to minimize the amount of raw materials purchased) but to fulfill a large number of orders a large inventory must be kept. In addition to resolving conflicts several issues arise when taking into account multiple criteria, such as defining optimality, expressing preferences, aggregating the criteria, generating bounds and/or heuristic distance information, guiding search, pruning branches, trading off planning time and solution optimality, etc. Dealing with multiple criteria is not a unique problem faced by researchers in AI planning and scheduling. Evaluating states and solutions based on multiple criteria is a problem occurring in other fields, in particular, combinatorial game search and multi-criteria decision making. Researchers in these areas have tended to address these related problems from a search or operations research perspective, respectively. During the last few years significant improvements have been made in the capabilities of planning systems to the point that they are now capable of producing plans with hundreds of actions in a few seconds. While such performance is commendable, it has been achieved with very simple action descriptions that would have little applicability on real-world problems. We believe that it is the time to investigate ways of improving action descriptions and to handle reasoning with multiple criteria, an area that has been neglected for too long. The workshop has several goals: 1. to review the current state of the art in reasoning with multiple criteria 2. to initiate discussions within the AI planning and scheduling communities on how these problems may be addressed 3. to initiate the transfer of applicable techniques, insights and experiences from other communities such as Operations Research, Uncertainty and Game communities. Technical Part ============== The technical part of the workshop will consist of papers dealing with multiple criteria in planning, scheduling, constraint reasoning, decision making, uncertainty and game search and will focus on, but will not be limited to addressing the following research questions: * defining optimality in the presence of multiple criteria * representing criteria preferences * computing aggregate criteria * generic methods to define bounds for multi-criteria branch-and-bound search * techniques to guide search based on multiple criteria * computing heuristic distance information in the presence of more than one criterion * near-optimal solutions, hard and soft criteria * evaluation of planners' performance based on multiple criteria (e.g. in the planning competition) * experience in dealing with real world applications Invited Talks & Panels ====================== To provide a focus for the interactions and discussions we plan to have two invited speakers, one from the planning community having experience in planning with multiple criteria, and one from the game search community. These talks will summarize the state of the art in their respective fields with respect to the issue of dealing with multiple criteria and highlight promising research paths. Submissions Papers should be a maximum of 5000 words, and should be submitted by email to Ioannis Refanidis (yrefanid csd auth gr) in any convenient format (PDF, PostScript, MS-Word), preferred compressed with gzip or winzip. Critical Dates ============== * Paper Submission Deadline: February 11, 2002 * Paper Notification: March 15, 2002 * Final papers Due: March 22, 2002 Organizers ========== Brian Drabble, CIRL, (drabble cirl uoregon edu) Jana Koehler, IBM Zurich, (koe zurich ibm com) Ioannis Refanidis, Aristotle Unversity (yrefanid csd auth gr) Committee ========= Mark Boddy, Honeywell Yannis Dimopoulos, University of Cyprus Patrick Doherty, Linkoping University Alfonso Gerevini, University of Brescia Hector Geffner, Universidad Simon Bolivar Richard Goodwin, IBM T.J.Watson Center Martin Mueller, University of Alberta Nicola Muscettola, NASA Karen Myers, SRI International Alexis Tsoukias, LAMSADE, Universite Paris Dauphine Ioannis Vlahavas, Aristotle University Joachim Paul Walser, I2 Technologies