Call for Papers

2015 International Workshop on Planning & Scheduling for Space

https://sites.google.com/view/iwpss2015/

This workshop is the 9th in a regular series that started in 1997 at Oxnard, California and included San Francisco (2000), Houston (2002), Darmstadt, Germany (2004), Baltimore (2006), Pasadena (2009, co-located with IJCAI), Darmstadt (2011), Moffett Field (2013), and now co-located with IJCAI 2015 (and the AI in Space Workshop) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

IWPSS focuses on the challenges and opportunities facing the planning and scheduling community when addressing the needs of a wide range of space-based applications. We invite submissions on a wide range of topic areas relating to space and planning and scheduling (broadly interpreted) including: techniques and algorithms, applications to space or aerospace, planning, scheduling execution, knowledge acquisition for planning & scheduling systems, embedded planning, scheduling, and execution systems, validation of planning and execution systems, and other general topic areas relating to planning & scheduling for space.

Over the past 15 years since the first workshop in this series, planning and scheduling systems have been successfully deployed to mission ground systems as well as onto spacecraft. In many cases, these deployments have documented cost reduction, increased science returns, and enabling new types of scientific observations. Yet still future missions do not consider automation by default. An improved infusion process is motivated by the need for planning and scheduling technologies to support an increasingly large, complex suite of missions at ever shrinking costs. This will be even more acute as net-centric observatories emerge. This workshop's will investigate how we can infuse planning and scheduling technologies into the evolving set of operational space missions.

Organizers and Co-Chairs: Steve Chien (JPL) and Marcelo Oglietti (CONAE)

Program Committee:

  • Roman Bartak, Charles University
  • Robert Morris (NASA Ames Research Center)
  • Mark Giuliano (STScI)
  • Mark Johnston (JPL)
  • Russell Knight (JPL)
  • Nicola Policella (ESA/ESOC)
  • Robin Steel (VEGA)
  • Angelo Oddi (ISTC-CNR)
  • Cedric Pralet (ONERA)

Important Dates:

Paper submission deadline: 27 April 2015 (Paper submission via easychair https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iwpss2015)

(full papers up to 8 pages AAAI style (http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php) or extended abstracts up to 4 pages)

Authors notified: 15 May 2015

Camera-ready papers due: 30 May 2015

Dates of workshop: 25-27 July 2015

Further information forthcoming.

Inquiries: steve.chien at jpl.nasa.gov or marcelo.oglietti at conae.gov.ar

Papers are solicited in all areas of planning, scheduling, execution, and knowledge acquisition relating to aerospace systems. Additionally, papers are solicited on the below topics. Papers covering other topics in Artificial Intelligence related to Space are encouraged to submit to our sister IJCAI Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Space.

Operational challenges of space applications: These are challenging problems currently solved by humans, which typically involve optimizing science returns in the face of mission cost and resource limitations, responding to unanticipated events, and operating in a partially understood environment.

Issues in deployment: Gaining mission acceptance of a planning and scheduling technology involves balancing the promise of a new technology with the need for safety, reliability, and usability. This includes the representation’s understandability, controllability of the underlying algorithms, interfaces to other tools, as well as the user interface.

Past and current deployments: There have been a number of past infusions of planning and scheduling technologies into missions, and each resulted in lessons learned when overcoming deployment obstacles as well as system use during the mission.

Recent advances in planning and scheduling and plan execution: These include advances in domain representation, algorithmic methods, verification, and embedded architectures for planning, scheduling, and plan execution applicable to space missions.

The aim of this workshop is to discuss these and other related issues in the context of space missions and applications. We welcome papers that offer insight into these and other planning and scheduling challenges. We especially welcome papers that describe deployed applications of planning and scheduling technology within space or space-relevant domains and papers that describe requirements for planning and scheduling in future missions.

Example applications include:

  • control of life support systems;
  • robotic assembly and construction;
  • spacecraft commanding and payload operations;
  • planning and scheduling for process control;
  • planning and scheduling for robotic space activities;
  • operations of air, space and ground-based scientific observatories;
  • planning and scheduling for sensor webs;
  • scheduling of critical resources on the ground and on-board;
  • science data analysis;
  • design and analysis of spacecraft systems;
  • planning and scheduling of scientific experiments; and planning and scheduling of crew activities.


We also welcome papers on new planning and scheduling technology that may be applicable to space domains and papers that integrate planning and scheduling with other techniques, such as:

  • planning and scheduling with time constraints;
  • planning and scheduling with uncertainty and resources;
  • mixed-initiative problem solving; robustness and fault tolerant schedules;
  • robust optimization;
  • and task execution.