Workshop on Integrating Planning, Acting, and Execution (IntEx)

1. Overview

Automated planners are increasingly being integrated into online execution systems. The integration may, for example, embed a domain-independent temporal planner in a manufacturing system (e.g., the Xerox printer application) or autonomous vehicles. The integration may resemble something more like a "planning stack" where an automated planner produces an activity or task plan that is further refined before being executed by a reactive controller (e.g., robotics). Or, the integration may be a domain-specific policy that maps states to actions (e.g., reinforcement learning). Online learning may or may not be involved, and may include adjusting or augmenting the model, determining when to repair versus replan, learning to switch policies, etc. A specific focus of these integrations involves online deliberation, bringing to the foreground concerns over how much computational effort planning should invest over time. But reality rarely proceeds according to the plan or the model. Planning, plan execution, diagnosis, and causal explanation have each been examined by various research efforts, but discussion of the linkages between them in the literature is still somewhat sparse. When considering how to integrate these functions, at least three questions must be considered: (1) System integration: how to integrate planning, plan execution, diagnosis, and causal explanation in a single system? (2) Model / Belief updates: when the unexpected happens, how does the system change its internal representation so future plans are effective? (3) Replanning: what to do now that the unexpected has happened?

Performing diagnosis while executing a plan gives a planning and execution agent an opportunity to recover from failures; however, it also raises many new issues. These include sharing reasoning time between planning and diagnosis, trading off execution resources between goal achievement and diagnostic testing (for active diagnosis), and how to act in the presence of multiple competing diagnoses.

The Third IntEx workshop aims to provide a forum for discussing the challenges of integrating planning with execution, emphasize the role of diagnosis in online planning and execution, and raise awareness, promote discussion, and encourage cross-fertilization of ideas from the following topics:

• Integration of planning and plan execution
  • Theory (e.g. flexibility vs uncertainty, replanning vs contingent planning algorithms)
  • Practice (technologies, architectures, system integration)
• Integration of planning and fault management (diagnosis, prognostics, anomaly detection) technologies:
  • Planning to Diagnose (active diagnosis)
  • Planning and Fault Model Integration (impact of diagnosis algorithms on plan model revision, level of abstraction of models)
• Integration of planning and causal explanation (state/event estimation and prediction) technologies:
  • Improving or revising plans based on inferred causal explanations
  • Revising long-term models based on causal explanation

In addition to the above special focus areas, we encourage short or long papers on past topics of interest to this workshop including: benchmarks or challenge problems for integrated execution; improving planning performance from execution experience; plan dispatching or plan executives; anytime or incremental planning; execution monitoring, comparing replanning, plan repair, regoaling, or plan merging; managing open worlds with closed-world planners; model learning from experience or determining an observation policy; policy switching or applying incremental policy adjustment.

1. Format

We plan a half day workshop with an invited speaker, Sheila McIlraith.

1. Submissions

Submissions may be regular papers (up to 8 pages plus references) or short position/challenge papers (up to 4 pages plus references). All papers should conform to the AAAI formatting guidelines and style ( http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php). The papers must be submitted in a PDF format via EasyChair ( https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=intex2019). Submissions will be reviewed by at least two referees.

We welcome existing publications from other venues that are appropriate for discussion at this workshop. Please note in the title area if this work is already accepted at another venue. If the work is under review at another venue (e.g. IJCAI) please notify the organizers so we can avoid potential reviewing conflicts.

At least one author of each accepted paper must attend the workshop in order to present the paper. Authors must register for the ICAPS main conference in order to attend the workshop. There will be no separate workshop-only registration.

1. Important Dates

• Paper submission: 3/30
• Notification of acceptance/rejection: 4/30
• Camera-ready paper submissions: 5/30
• Workshop date: TBD

1. Organizers

• Mak Roberts (Naval Research Laboratory, USA. Contact: mark.roberts@nrl.navy.mil)
• Tiago Vaquero (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, USA. Contact: vaquero@jpl.nasa.gov)
• Tim Niemueller (RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Contact: niemueller@kbsg.rwth-aachen.de)
• Simone Fratini (European Space Agency, Germany. Contact: simone.fratini@esa.int)

1. Schedule (Friday, July 12, 2019)

Proceedings are available here.

Talks are 20 minutes with 5 minutes for questions.

0900	Session 1
	Welcome and Introduction
	A Hybrid Planning and Execution Approach Through HTN and MCTS Xenija Neufeld, Sanaz Mostaghim and Diego Perez-Liebana Automated Verification of Social Laws Robustness for Reactive Agents Alexander Tuisov and Erez Karpas Monitoring Numeric Expectations in Goal Reasoing Agents Noah Reifsnyder and Hector Munoz-Avila
1030	Morning Break
1100	Session 2
	Enabling Limited Resource-Bounded Disjunction in Scheduling Jagriti Agrawal, Wayne Chi, Steve Chien, Gregg Rabideau, Stephen Kuhn and Daniel Gaines Interleaving Acting and Planning Using Operational Models Sunandita Patra, Malik Ghallab, Dana Nau and Paolo Traverso Executing Multi-Goal Mission Plans for Coordinated Mobile Robots Marlyse Reeves, Enrique Fernandez Gonzalez and Brian Williams
1230	Lunch
1400	Guest Speaker: Christian Fritz
	Co-located with the Actions Workshop! Title: Planning in Industry, An Experience Report Abstract: During my 8+ years working in industry I have encountered several problems that lent themselves to solutions that relied on knowledge representation and planning. This includes automated process planning and designing fixtures for CNC machining, mixed-mode transportation planning, high-level task planning for a mobile service robot, and automated testing of robot-behavior. In this talk I will describe these problems and discuss our solution to a couple of them in detail, focusing on aspects that put some of the assumptions made in academic planning research into question. My objective with this is to convince primarily the students in the audience that in these problems (a) representation, not planning, was the most impactful ingredient to success, that (b) in any automation problem the plan does not matter but execution does, and that (c), unsurprisingly, domain-independence does not matter when faced with problems in any specific domain. Bio: Christian's background is in knowledge representation and planning. He is currently the Vice President of Software Engineering at Savioke, maker of the Relay robot, an autonomous delivery robot for crowded indoor environments like hotels and hospitals. Prior to joining Savioke Christian led the Representation and Planning Area at PARC, a Xerox Company. Christian earned his BS and MS from RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and his PhD from the University of Toronto, Canada.
1500	Poster Session
1530	Afternoon break
	On Expected Value Strong Controllability Jeremy Frank Dynamic Controllability with Single and Multiple Indirect Observations Paul Morris and Arthur Bit-Monnot Executing Contingent Plans: Addressing Challenges in Deploying Artificial Agents Christian Muise, Miroslav Vodolan, Shubham Agarwal, Ondrej Bajgar, Luis Lastras and Josef Ondrej