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CALL FOR PAPERS

Heuristics and Search for Domain-independent Planning (HSDIP 2019)

https://icaps19.icaps-conference.org/hsdip.html

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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.

### Topics and Objectives

Search guided by heuristics, automatically derived from a
declarative formulation of action effects, preconditions and
goals, has been a successful approach to domain-independent
planning. From the initial success of heuristics based on
syntactic relaxations and abstractions, the theory and
practice of developing novel heuristics have become more
diverse, often borrowing concepts and tools from Optimisation
and Satisfiability, and bolder, tackling more expressive
planning languages.

In parallel to the increasing maturity of the methods and tools
used to derive heuristic methods, important theoretical results
have brought around a more clear image of how heuristic methods
relate to each other. For instance, it has been shown that classic
frameworks for heuristic search as planning can be encoded
symbolically and their execution simulated via off-the-shelf
satisfiability solvers. Groundbreaking theoretical work has shown
how heuristic methods can be grouped into distinct families,
depending on whether they can or cannot be shown to dominate or
be compiled into each other.

As a result, the formulation of heuristics for domain-independent
planning is increasingly being less about describing procedures
that exploit specific features in declarative information, and
more about describing auxiliary constraints that make apparent
those features to off-the-shelf solvers that operate over a
logical or algebraic theory that over-approximate the set of valid
plans and compute the heuristic estimator.

Last, but not least, there is a growing realization that the search
algorithm used can significantly amplify or reduce the utility of
specific heuristics. Recent work that highlights the pitfalls latent
in well-known search algorithms, also suggests opportunities to
exploit synergies between the heuristic calculation and the search
control.

The workshop on Heuristics and Search for Domain-Independent Planning
(HSDIP) is the 11th 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
- formal results showing equivalence or dominance between heuristics
- novel heuristic methods dealing with planning with numeric variables
and effects, partial observability and non-deterministic action
effects
- heuristic estimators for domain-independent planning via procedures
or suitably defined encodings of declarative descriptions of planning
tasks into Satisfiability or Optimisation
- novel search techniques for domain-independent planning that explicitly
aim at exploiting effectively the properties of existing heuristics
- empirical observations of synergies between heuristics and search in
domain-independent planning
- challenging domains for existing combinations of heuristics and search
algorithms

The HSDIP workshop has always been welcoming of multidisciplinary work,
for example, drawing inspiration from operations research (like row and
column generation algorithms), convex optimization (like gradient
optimization for hybrid planning), constraint programming or
satisfiability, or applications of machine learning in heuristic search
(e.g., learning heuristics, adaptive search strategies, or heuristic selection). We will keep this stance, particularly as ICAPS 2019 will
continue the special track on planning & learning.

### Submissions

Please format submissions in AAAI style (see instructions in the Author
Kit at https://www.aaai.org/Publications/Templates/AuthorKit19.zip) and
keep them to at most 9 pages including references. Authors considering submitting to the workshop papers rejected from the main conference,
please ensure you do your utmost to address the comments given by ICAPS reviewers. Please do not submit papers that are already accepted for
the main conference to the workshop.

Submissions will be made through OpenReview

https://openreview.net/group?id=icaps-conference.org/ICAPS/2019/Workshop/HSDIP

The following conditions apply:

- Submissions will be double blind to the general public, but single blind
to the official reviewers and organizing committee.
- The submitted papers, reviews and author responses to those will be public,
and all anonymous.
- Discussions between reviewers and organisers will be private.

Every submission will be reviewed by two members of the organizing
committee according to the usual criteria such as relevance to the workshop, significance of the contribution, and technical quality.

Submissions sent to other conferences are allowed. It is the responsibility
of the authors to ensure that those venues allow for papers submitted to be already published in "informal" ways (e.g. on proceedings or websites
without associated ISSN/ISBN).

The workshop is meant to be an open and inclusive forum, and we encourage papers that report on work in progress or that do not fit the mold of a typical conference paper. Non-trivial negative results are welcome to the workshop, but we expect the authors to argue for the signficance of the presented results to alternative lines of research on the topic of choice.

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.

### Deadlines and Dates

Submission deadline: 15 March 2019 (UTC-12 timezone)
Notification: 12 April 2019
Camera Ready: 24 May 2019
Workshop: 11/12 July 2019

### Contact and Enquiries

Daniel Gnad, Saarland University, daniel.gnad at cs.uni-saarland.de
Miquel Ramirez, University of Melbourne, miquel.ramirez at unimelb.edu.au

### Workshop Organizers

Patrik Haslum, Australian National University, Australia
Daniel Gnad, Saarland University, Germany
Miquel Ramirez, University of Melbourne, Australia
Florian Pommerening, University of Basel, Switzerland
Jendrik Seipp, University of Basel, Switzerland
Florian Geisser, Australian National University, Australia
Guillem Francès, University of Basel, Switzerland
Silvan Sievers, University of Basel, Switzerland

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