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: