AIPS'98 Planning Systems Competition -- Preliminary Call for Participation
The 1998 AI Planning Systems Conference will host the first bi-annual
planning systems competition. The goal of this competition is to
foster development of state-of-the-art planning systems and to
encourage the comparison of competing approaches to planning. The
competition will be comprised of three tracks, the first two focus on
general approaches to operator-based planning for different operator
languages and the third one focuses on planners for solving a specific
transporation planning domain. Details on the third track will be
available shortly. Entrants can compete in any or all of
the tracks of the competition.
This is a preliminary call, which means that we may still refine the
details of the competition based on feedback. So, please send your
comments to planning-contest@isi.edu about the competition. We also
would like to encourage people to register their intent to compete as
early as possible (registration details below).
STRIPS AND ADL OPERATOR-BASED PLANNING
In the first two tracks, competitors will submit an operator-based
planner that takes a planning domain (in one of the two languages
defined below) and a planning problem in a predefined format and
produces a plan that solves the given problem. Planners will be
evaluated based on how many problems are solved, how quickly the plans
are produced, and the length of the resulting plans.
Planner Language:
The only difference between the first two tracks of the competition is
the operator language used to define the domains. The precise syntax
of the operators and problems is provided in the document, PDDL -- The
Planning Domain Definition Language:
ftp://ftp.cs.yale.edu/pub/mcdermott/software/pddl.tar.gz
Track 1 -- Strips operators: Operators only contain conjunctive
preconditions and a simple list of effects. In terms of PDDL, the
first class corresponds to a planner that supports :strips
Track 2 -- ADL operators: Operators may contain an
extended language
that includes typing, disjunctive preconditions, equality, quantified
preconditions, conditional effects, expression evaluation, and axioms.
This is essentially ADL with axioms and built-in functions. In terms
of PDDL, this class corresponds to :adl + :domain-axioms +
:subgoal-through-axioms + :expression-evaluation.
For each of these classes of languages, the planners will be tested on
sets of problems from multiple domains. Some example PDDL domains
are available from:
ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu/pub/ai/domains-pddl.tgz
Entrants will have a chance and are encouraged to submit their own
domain(s) in one or more of the languages classes as possible domain(s) for
the contest.
Mechanics:
Each planner entry must run on a SUN Ultra workstation under Solaris.
[If you want to enter the contest, but this would prevent you from
entering please let us know that as soon as possible.] The planners
should take three parameters as input, the file name containing the
domain defintion, the file name containing a single problem
definition, and the file name where the solution should be stored.
The format for the input is defined in the PDDL manual. The output
file should be in the following format:
((op1 arg1 ... argn)
(op2 arg1 ... argn)
.
.
.
(opn arg1 ... argn))
If no solution exists, then the planner should output :NO-PLAN.
Axioms used in the plan should not be included in the printed
solution. We will make example input and output files available prior
to the contest.
Scoring:
The set of planners in each track will be ranked by three criteria:
number of problems solved, total time used, and total length for all
solutions. If a planner fails to find a solution to a problem, then
the length will be one plus the maximum length found by any of the planners for
that problem. The final score for each planner will be the sum of the
three ranks. Ties will be broken by the planner that performed better
on number of problems solved and then by total planning time.
Updates and examples problems will be available from:
http://www.isi.edu/ariadne/planning-contest
Please check this site periodically for any rule changes or refinements.
Registration:
If you plan to compete in the competition, we ask that you send a
short message to planning-contest@isi.edu by January 31, 1998
with the following information:
Name:
email:
Institution:
Tracks (strips, adl, transportation):
Language/compiler: