Heuristics and Search for Domain-independent Planning (HSDIP)

Heuristics and search algorithms are the two key components of heuristic search, one of the main approaches to many variations of domain-independent planning, including classical planning, temporal planning, planning under uncertainty and adversarial planning. This workshop seeks to understand the underlying principles of current heuristics and search methods, their limitations, ways for overcoming those limitations, as well as the synergy between heuristics and search. HSDIP-16 will be a part of the ICAPS 2016 conference.

For questions please contact the HSDIP Chairs

Topics and Objectives

State-space search guided by heuristics, automatically derived from the problem representation, has been one of the most popular, and arguably one of the most successful, approaches to domain-independent planning in the last decade. While there has been significant developments in the design of planning heuristics, such that there are now many different kinds of heuristics, and some theories of how they relate to each other have begun to emerge, there is also a growing realization that the search algorithm plays an equally important role in the approach. Recent work has highlighted some of the weaknesses of some search algorithms, but also the rich opportunities for exploiting synergies between the heuristic calculation and the search to improve both, drawing on the fact that domain-independent planning offers a declarative description of the state space (not just a "black box" successor function).

The workshop on Heuristics and Search for Domain-Independent Planning (HSDIP) is the eighth workshop in a series that started with the "Heuristics for Domain-Independent Planning" (HDIP) workshops at ICAPS 2007. At ICAPS 2012, the workshop was changed to its current name and scope to explicitly encourage work on search for domain-independent planning.

Examples of typical topics for submissions to this workshop are:

• Automatic derivation of heuristic estimators for domain-independent planning
• Search techniques for domain-independent planning
• Synergy between heuristics and search in domain-independent planning
• Challenging domains for heuristic search planning

Monday (June 13, 2016)

Important Dates

• Abstract submission deadline: March 11, 2016 (UTC-12 timezone)
• Paper submission deadline: March 13, 2016 (UTC-12 timezone)
• Notification of acceptance: April 1, 2016
• Camera-ready paper submissions: May 22, 2016

• Workshop date: June 13, 2016

Organizing Committee

• J. Benton NASA Ames Research Center and the RISE Foundation, USA
• Daniel Bryce SIFT, USA
• Michael Katz IBM Watson Health, Israel
• Nir Lipovetzky University of Melbourne, Australia
• Christian Muise MIT, USA
• Miquel Ramırez ANU, Australia
• Alvaro Torralba Saarland University, Germany