W7. Moving Planning and Scheduling Systems into the Real World

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Chairs

Preface

Planning and scheduling technologies have matured significantly in recent years, making it possible for them to start to be deployed in application areas such as logistics planning, workflow systems, space mission planning, entertainment, and the military. Some of these early deployments have shown that, while automated planning and scheduling technologies have an important role to play, applications demand much more than efficient algorithms. To build on these initial successes, the community must both understand better the requirements inherent to deploying planning and scheduling systems, and work to develop solutions for them.

The intent of this workshop is to bring together researchers who are working on or interested in real-world planning and scheduling systems, along with those who can bring expertise from outside of the planning and scheduling community relevant to the successful development and deployment of real-world systems.

The workshop is designed to be a forum for topics beyond the theoretical or even practical modeling of planning and scheduling problems and the development of algorithms to solve them, important as these ongoing efforts are. The goals are to stimulate broader thinking within the planning and scheduling community about the factors that play significant roles in applications, and to foster an exchange of ideas, approaches, and experiences that will improve the community's ability to transition its research to important problem domains.

Topics of interest for the workshop include:

• Lessons learned in building or deploying planning and scheduling applications
• System design - principles, methodologies, strategies
• Tool support environments
• Interoperability and integration
• Mixed-initiative problem solving
• Knowledge acquisition
• Verification and validation of domain models and software for planning and scheduling
• Adjustable autonomy
• Integrated planning, scheduling, and execution
• Representation and reasoning - practical trade-offs
• Learning for customization and performance improvement
• User interface design for planning and scheduling systems
• Visualization and explanation of plans and schedules
• Robustness to uncertainty and execution failures

Contributions were solicited in two general areas. The first is reporting on planning and scheduling applications that have been or are being developed to address problems of practical import. These application descriptions need not encompass complete solutions, but must clearly target some significant portion of a real-world problem. The second area is technical work that, although perhaps not linked to a specific application, has been pursued with an eye toward enabling practical applications in the future.

Committee

List of Papers