IPC-4 Special Issue

As in the former years, there is a posterior publication on IPC-4. Maria Fox and David E. Smith have agreed to serve as Guest Editors. Here are some informations on the call for paper:

The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) is soliciting papers from the competitors of the 4th International Planning Competition. As you may know, JAIR had a very successful special issue appear last year with papers from the 3rd competition.

This time, JAIR like to have a "special track" rather than a "special issue". That is, instead of putting out one issue with all the papers appearing at one time, we would exploit the advantages of being an electronic journal, and publish accepted and revised papers as they are ready, in the stream of the regular current issue. However, we would mark the papers as being part of the "Special Track on the 4th International Planning Competition" and will also provide a separate link that brings up only the papers (so far published) in that special track--sort of like a virtual special issue. The only real restriction is that the two overview/results papers for the deterministic and non-deterministic parts of the competition will have to be the first papers published.

Normally journal papers present and evaluate new theories, and/or techniques. However, we recognize that there is substantial effort and engineering involved in building a competition planning system. We believe that the competitors should be rewarded for these efforts, and that descriptions and evaluations of such systems are quite valuable to the community. Thus, in addition to overview/results articles written by the competition organizers, we are interested in two different kinds of submissions for this special track:

-- full technical papers describing and explaining systems that utilized new techniques (or perhaps novel combinations of techniques)

-- shorter "Engineering Notes" of 5-15 pages describing and evaluating systems that rely on established techniques. (Engineering Notes will be identified in a manner similar to Research Notes, e.g. Zanuttini, JAIR 19

With both kinds of papers, we encourage online appendices containing the system code and experimental data.

All papers will receive full review, and therefore are subject to possible rejection. However, Engineering Notes will be reviewed using different criteria - namely they should be clear and coherent descriptions and/or evaluations of the system that participated in the competition. We ask that authors notify us by September 1, 2004 of their intention to submit a paper, and of which type of paper they intend to submit. Papers should be submitted through the normal JAIR submission process (http://jair.org/submission-info.html) with a comment in the special information box indicating that the paper is being submitted to the IPC-4 Special Track and indicating whether the paper is a full paper or an Engineering Note. Submissions are due no later than December 17, 2004, but earlier submissions are encouraged.

Additional questions about the special track can be directed to:

Maria Fox (Maria.Fox@cis.strath.ac.uk) David E. Smith (desmith@arc.nasa.gov)

Guest Editors, JAIR Special Track on the 4th International Planning Competition

IPC-4 Booklet

In the previous competitions, information about the algorithms used by the competitors was not made publicly available at the time of the competition event. Consequently, at conference time there was no chance of knowing what the single planners do except trying to catch their makers. We assembled and distributed (to all ICAPS'04 participants) a joint competition proceeding hand-out, containing extended abstracts (1-3 pages) describing the competing systems.