17th Workshop of the UK Planning and Scheduling Special Interest Group

September 9-10, 1998

University of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire (England)

The 1998 workshop of the UK Planning and Scheduling Special Interest Group will be held at Canalside West, an award winning 19th Century renovated textile mill, on the campus of the University of Huddersfield. The workshop is a yearly forum where academics, industrialists and research students can meet and discuss current issues in an informal setting. We especially aim to bring together researchers attacking different aspects of planning and scheduling problems, and to introduce new researchers to the community. In recent years the SIG has attracted an international gathering, and we continue to welcome contributions from around the world.

Topics of interest include:

Applications: empirical studies of existing planning/scheduling systems; domain-specific techniques; heuristic techniques; user interfaces for planning and scheduling.
Architectures: real-time support for planning/scheduling/control; mixed- initiative planning and user interfaces.
Environmental and task models: analyses of the dynamics of environments, tasks, and domains with regard to different models of planning and execution.
Formal Models: reasoning about knowledge, action, and time; representations and ontologies for planning and scheduling; search methods and analysis of algorithms; formal characterisation of existing planners and schedulers.
Intelligent Agency: resource-bounded reasoning; distributed problem solving; integrating reaction and deliberation.
Learning: learning in the context of planning and execution; learning new plans and operators; learning in the context of scheduling and schedule maintenance.
Memory Based Approaches: case-based planning/scheduling; plan and operator learning and reuse; incremental planning.
Planning and Perception: integration of planning and perceptual systems.
Reactive Systems: environmentally driven devices/behaviours; reactive control; behaviours in the context of minimal representations; schedule maintenance.
Robotics: Motion and path planning; planning and control; planning and perception.
Constraint-based Planning/Scheduling and Control Techniques: constraint/preference propagation techniques, variable/value ordering heuristics, intelligent backtracking/RMS-based techniques, iterative repair heuristics, etc.
Coordination Issues in Decentralised/Distributed planning/scheduling: coordination issues in both homogeneous and heterogeneous systems, system architecture issues, integration of strategic and tactical decision making.
Iterative Improvement Techniques for Combinatorial Optimisation: genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, tabu search, neural nets, etc applied to scheduling and/or planning.
Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research: comparative studies and innovative applications combining AI and OR techniques, applied to scheduling and/or planning.

NEW

PROGRAMME

A provisional programme of presentations is available here:

ATTENDANCE

Anyone with an interest in Planning and Scheduling is welcome - it is not necessary to submit a paper in order to attend.

REGISTRATION

The Registration fee will include attendance at the Workshop on Sept 9th and 10th, lunch and morning and afternoon tea/coffee, and a copy of the Proceedings. Registration forms are available here:

ACCOMMODATION

Accommodation will be available for the nights of September 8th and 9th at The George Hotel , in the town centre, at a reduced rate of 45.00 pounds sterling per person per night, including full English breakfast and VAT. The hotel is close to the Railway Station and a short walk from the Queensgate campus. Delegates should book directly with the hotel, but please state that you are attending the workshop at the University at the time of booking in order to benefit from the reduced rate. The George Hotel may be contacted at:

The George Hotel, Huddersfield,
St. George's Square,
Huddersfield,
West Yorks, HD1 1JA
Tel: 01484 515444
Fax: 01484 435056

For information on alternative accommodation within easy reach of the University:

Other useful information:

SUBMISSIONS

Format of submissions:

(i) Full papers: (approx 5000 words). These should report work in progress or completed work. Authors of full papers which are accepted by the Programme Committee will be invited to give a talk on the paper.

(ii) Short papers: (2 pages) These should report views or ambitions, or describe problems. The author(s) will be able to discuss the paper informally with others at the workshop and may be invited to give a short presentation on their work.

Three hard copies of papers should be sent to the Programme Chair to arrive no later than May 29th, 1998. Alternatively, papers can be submitted before this date via email, as compressed and uuencoded postscript files, named author.ps, or ascii text files, named author.txt, in both cases using the name of the first author.

All submissions will be reviewed by two referees, and successful submissions will appear in the Workshop Proceedings. Also, accepted papers submitted in HTML format will be made available via the SIG website.

Submissions and inquiries should be sent to:

Lee McCluskey

17th UK Planning and Scheduling SIG,
Department of Computing Science,
School of Computing and Mathematics,
The University of Huddersfield,
Queensgate, Huddersfield,
West Yorks HD1 3DH, UK
tel: +44 1484 472247
email: lee@zeus.hud.ac.uk

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

IMPORTANT DATES