Welcome

The International Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling has been running since 2005 as a bi-annual event promoting the development and importance of the use of knowledge engineering methods and techniques within P & S. Past events include ICKEPS-05 held during ICAPS at San Francisco in June 2005, and ICKEPS-07 held during ICAPS at Providence in September 2007.

While those events focussed on general areas of KEPS, this year we will focus on a specific aspect of knowledge engineering technology: tools, translators and techniques that when input with a model described in an application-area-specific language, output solver-ready domain models. For example, we would like to encourage application developers in Web Services, Workflow, Business Modelling, E-Learning, Games, Narrative Generation etc to utilise planning technology. To do this, we need to promote the development of translators from (for example):

• web service languages (eg OWL-S, DAML),
• workflow languages,
• business modelling or processing languages (eg BPEL),
• software requirements languages (eg B, UML),
• E-learning metadata languages

into solver-ready domain models. As well as being useful tools in their own right, the study of the translation process highlights fundamental research problems in P & S, particularly in the use of domain-independent solvers. Many users in applications areas of P & S would be tempted to implement their own solver, and embed specific heuristics. Rather, ICKEPS-09 promotes the use of existing domain-independent solvers, but will highlight the research challenges such as the expressiveness of their input/output languages, and the problem of providing a heuristics interface.

In conjunction with the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-09)