========================================================================== Fifth International Planning Competition Final Call for Participation to the Deterministic Part http://ipc5.ing.unibs.it ========================================================================== The International Planning Competition is a biennial event which is hosted at the Automated Planning and Scheduling Conference (ICAPS). The general objectives of the competition are to provide a forum for empirical comparison of planning systems, to highlight challenges to the community in the form of problems at the edge of current capabilities, to propose new directions for research and to provide a core of common benchmark problems and a representation formalism that can aid in the comparison and evaluation of planning systems. In the previous International planning competitions, the plan generation CPU-time played a central role in the evaluation of the competing planners. In the fifth International planning competition (IPC-5), while considering the CPU-time, we intend to give greater emphasis to plan quality and the number of problems solved. Additional details will be announced to the participants. The Fifth International Planning Competition (IPC-5) is hosted at ICAPS-2006 and consists of two tracks: the Deterministic Track (previously called "Classical Track") and the Probabilistic Track. Everyone who is considering entering the deterministic track of IPC-5 should consult the website of the 2006 competition, where information and documents about the event are incrementally posted. In particular, a document describing the new version of PDDL (the planning language of the competition) that will be used in IPC-5 is available from the IPC-5 website. Since the language of IPC-5 (PDDL3.0) is a significant extension of the previous version of the competition language (PDDL2.2), there will be different categories of domains involving different new features of PDDL3.0, as well a distinction between metric-temporal domains and propositional (STRIPS-like or simple-ADL) domains. A competing team can participate in the competition only for a subset of the domain categories. However, the participants are strongly encouraged to run their planner in every domain category that is supported by the planner. The categories of domains are announced in the website of IPC-5. Planners supporting more than one domain category involving new features of the language are particularly welcome. We intend to test the planners using rules similar to those of the previous competition (IPC-4, 2004). In particular, the participants will remotely run their planners using the competition machine. As in IPC-4, during the period of the competition tests, the contestants will be allowed to modify their planners. However, by the end of the test phase, an executable that generates all the results produced will have to be sent to the organizers. This executable will be used by the organizers for checking the results produced. In the evaluation of the results, we intend to distinguish optimal planners and sub-optimal planners. More details will be communicated to the participants. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- REGISTRATION AND SCHEDULE Each participant should register by sending an email to the competition chair including the filled in registration form available from the competition web site. The registration deadline is JANUARY 20 2006. The tentative schedule of the competition activities is: January 20 '06: Registration deadline February 1 '06: Competition tests start March 10 '06: Deadline for the abstracts about the competing planners April 15 '06: Competition tests end; executables are delivered April 15 '06: Deadline for the final version of the abstracts April-May '06: Collection and evaluation of the results June '06: Announcement of the results and winners at ICAPS'06 Possible additional (intermediate) deadlines will be communicated to the registered participants by the organizers. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- IPC-5 WEB SITE (Deterministic Track): http://ipc5.ing.unibs.it -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- IPC-5 EMAIL (Deterministic track): ipc5@ing.unibs.it -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ORGANIZERS OF THE DETERMINISTIC TRACK OF IPC-5 Alfonso Gerevini (Chair) University of Brescia, Italy gerevini@ing.unibs.it Yannis Dimopoulos University of Cyprus, Cyprus yannis@cs.ucy.ac.cy Patrik Haslum Linkoeping University, Sweden pahas@ida.liu.se Alessandro Saetti University of Brescia, Italy saetti@ing.unibs.it Consulting Committee of IPC-5: see http://ipc5.ing.unibs.it -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- OTHER USEFUL LINKS IPC-4: http://ls5-www.cs.uni-dortmund.de/~edelkamp/ipc-4/ ICAPS 2006: http://icaps06.icaps-conference.org/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------