e-mail: d.kitchin@hud.ac.uk
Tel: 01484 472204 (direct line)
Tel: 01484 472000
Fax: 01484 421106


This Symposium, part of the AISB'00 Convention to be held at the University of Birmingham on April 17 - 20, 2000, will provide a forum for the discussion of current issues in AI Planning. As the theme of the Convention is `Time for AI and Society' we particularly welcome submissions on the theme of `AI Planning and Intelligent Agents', covering any aspect of the connections between planning and agent-based reasoning. Intelligent Agents need to reason and plan, possibly under temporal constraints, while planning needs relevant domains and applications, so we feel an exchange of ideas and views between these 2 areas would be both stimulating and useful. Submissions are also invited on any aspect of the field of AI Planning, including, but not restricted to, Robotics, Co-operative Agents, Reasoning about Knowledge, Action and Time, Constraint-based Planning Control Techniques, Scheduling, Distributed Planning, Case-based Planning, Search, Representation Languages for Planning, AI Planning & Scheduling Applications, HTN Planning, Graph-based Planning and Reactive Planning.

Automated Planning has been a central research area in artificial intelligence for over thirty years. AI Planning is increasingly being exploited in high-profile projects such as the \$66m `ARPI' Advanced Planning Technology Initiative focused on military `crisis action planning'. This started in 1989 and is now in its fourth phase. The Space Industry, both in the US and in Europe, is also applying AI Planning in areas from communications network management to on-job astronaut training. The growing interest in AI Planning is also shown by the setting up in 1998 of the EU-funded network of excellence in AI Planning, PLANET. There is also increasing interest in Intelligent Agents, multi-agent systems and virtual environments. The recent RAX (Remote Agent Experiment) project on NASA's Deep Space 1 spacecraft allowed the primary command of a spacecraft to be given to a Remote Agent which incorporated a planning component. Given the level of interest in these two areas, and the fact that the theme of the Convention is `Time for AI and Society', we propose a symposium with the theme of `AI Planning and Intelligent Agents'. Intelligent Agents need to reason and plan, possibly under temporal constraints, while planning needs relevant domains and applications, so we feel an exchange of ideas and views between these 2 areas would be both stimulating and useful. The symposium could work towards the identification of a set of common research problems in Agent Technology and AI Planning and of areas ripe for cross-fertilisation.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

Ruth Aylett, University of Salford
Lee McCluskey, University of Huddersfield
Julie Porteous, University of Durham
Sam Steel, University of Essex

Call for Extended Abstracts/Papers
A list of accepted papers is available here , and a more detailed timetable will be available shortly.