The Scheduling and Planning Applications woRKshop (SPARK)

Collocated with ICAPS 2019 in Berkeley, USA.

Overview

Application domains that contain planning and scheduling (P&S) problems present a set of interesting challenges to the AI planning and scheduling community -- from modelling to technical to institutional issues. New real-world domains and problems are becoming increasingly affordable for AI and P&S techniques. The international Scheduling and Planning Applications woRKshop (SPARK) series was established to foster the practical application of advances made in the AI P&S community.

Workshop Aim

The workshop series aims to provide a stable forum on relevant topics connected to application-focused research and the deployment of P&S systems. The immediate legacy began in 2007 with the ICAPS'07 Workshop on "Moving Planning and Scheduling Systems into the Real World", and continued in 2008-2018 with successful yearly editions. 2019 is the 12th edition of SPARK.

The websites of the previous editions of SPARK are available at http://decsai.ugr.es/~lcv/SPARK. These workshops presented a stimulating environment where researchers could discuss the opportunity and challenges in moving P&S developments into practice, and analyze domains and problem instances under study for, or closely inspired by, real industrial/commercial deployment of P&S techniques.

The challenges and discussions that emerged in the last years' editions set the baseline for this year's SPARK workshop. A goal of the workshop series is the definition of a longer term set of challenges that could be of benefit for the research community as well as practitioners. SPARK is the ideal incubator to test, discuss, mature and improve potential papers for that main track with the feedback of an excellent audience, and great place for the inception of new applications and challenges.

Authors of accepted papers will be encouraged to share their domains and instances, or parts of them, towards a library of practical benchmarking problems that could also be useful for the community.

Accepted papers will be presented in plenary or poster sessions during the workshop. Each presented paper will receive comments from a designated moderator, in order to start the discussion at the workshop.

Schedule

The full SPARK schedule, along with links to the accepted papers, can be obtained at the schedule page. A concise version is below:

Time Program
0900-0912 Workshop Open
   
  Session 1: Aerospace Applications
0912-0924 Constraint Integer Program Formulations for NASA Planning, Scheduling, and Autonomy Problems
Richard Levinson
0924-0936 Automated Science Scheduling for the ECOSTRESS Mission
Amruta Yelamanchili, Steve Chien, Alan Moy, Elly Shao, Michael Trowbridge, Kerry Cawse-Nicholson, Jordan Padams, Dana Freeborn
0936-0948 Autonomous Scheduling of Agile Spacecraft Constellations with Delay Tolerant Networking for Reactive Imaging
Sreeja Nag, Alan S. Li, Vinay Ravindra, Marc Sanchez Net, Kar-Ming Cheung, Rod Lammers, Brian Bledsoe
0948-1000 Scheduling with Complex Consumptive Resources for a Planetary Rover  
Wayne Chi, Steve Chien, Jagriti Agrawal
1000-1030 Session 1 Discussion
1030-1100 Coffee Break / Posters
   
  Session 2: Tutorial
1100-1230 Tutorial: P&S Approaches for Urban Traffic Control
1230-1400 Lunch Break
   
  Session 3: Planning & Scheduling with Preferences
1400-1412 Privacy-aware Adaptive Scheduling for Coalition Operations
Karen L. Myers, Tom Lee, Laura Tam, Jose Manuel Calderon Trilla, Ben Davis, Stephen Magill
1412-1424 Planning and Scheduling for Cooperative Concurrent Agents with Different Qualifications in the Domain of Home Health Care Management
Colja A. Becker, Ingo J. Timm
1424-1436 Learning-based Preference Prediction for Constrained Multi-Criteria Path-Planning
Kevin Osanlou, Christophe Guettier, Andrei Bursuc, Tristan Cazenave, Eric Jacopin
1436-1448 The Value of Incorporating Social Preferences in Dynamic Ridesharing
Saisubramanian, Sandhya and Basich, Connor and Zilberstein, Shlomo and Goldman, Claudia
1448-1500 A Capacited Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Problem for Passengers: A Modelling and Solution Approach
Sergio Ferrer, Miguel A. Salido, Adriana Giret, Federico Barber
1500-1530 Session 3 Discussion
1530-1600 Coffee Break / Posters
   
  Session 4: Automated Reasoning in Real Domains
1600-1612 Enabling Limited Resource-Bounded Disjunction in Scheduling
Jagriti Agrawal, Wayne Chi, Steve Chien, Gregg Rabideau, Stephen Khun, Daniel Gaines
1612-1624 Quantum Circuit Compilation: An Emerging Application for Automated Reasoning
Davide Venturelli, Minh Do, Bryan O'Gorman, Jeremy Frank, Eleanor Rieffel, Kyle E. C. Booth, Thanh Nguyen, Parvathi Narayan, Sasha Nanda
1624-1636 Advantages and Challenges of Using AI Planning in Cloud Migration
Hongtan Sun, Maja Vukovic, John Rofrano, Chen Lin
1636-1648 Evaluating the Cost of Employing LPs and STPs in Planning: Lessons Learned From Large Real-Life Domains
Elad Denenberg, Amanda Coles, Derek Long
1648-1718 Session 4 Discussion
1718-1730 Workshop Close

Format

Starting from the results of the previous editions, SPARK'19 will deepen the debate on application-relevant aspects of P&S theory and practice, with the aim of reporting and discussing experiences relating to deploying P&S systems.

Topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:

Submissions

Submissions may be regular papers (up to 8 pages plus references) or short position papers (up to 2 pages, including references). All papers should conform to the AAAI formatting guidelines and style (except the AAAI copyright notice can be removed). Submissions will be reviewed by at least three referees.

This year, SPARK (along with many other ICAPS workshops) is debuting the use of Open Review to handle submissions and the review process. If this is your first use of Open Review and you have questions regarding your submission and the way it will be handled, please feel free to get in touch with the workshop organizers.

Submissions may be made here: SPARK Submission Website

Important Dates

Organizers