SPARK

This workshop series aims to provide a stable forum on relevant topics connected to application-focused research and the deployment of P&S systems. The immediate legacy began in 2007 with the ICAPS'07 Workshop on `Moving Planning and Scheduling Systems into the Real World’, and continued in 2008-2020 with successful yearly editions. 2022 is the 15th edition of SPARK. The websites of the previous editions of SPARK are available at http://decsai.ugr.es/~lcv/SPARK. These workshops presented a stimulating environment where researchers could discuss the opportunity and challenges in moving P&S developments into practice, and analyze domains and problem instances under study for, or closely inspired by, real industrial/commercial deployment of P&S techniques. The challenges and discussions that emerged in the last years' editions set the baseline for this year's SPARK workshop. A goal of the workshop series is the definition of a longer term set of challenges that could be of benefit for the research community as well as practitioners. SPARK is the ideal incubator to test, discuss, mature and improve potential papers for that main track with the feedback of an excellent audience, and a great place for the inception of new applications and challenges. Authors of accepted papers will be encouraged to share their domains and instances, or parts of them, towards a library of practical benchmarking problems that could also be useful for the community. Accepted papers will be presented in plenary or poster sessions during the workshop. Each presented paper will receive comments from a designated moderator, in order to start the discussion at the workshop.

Topics

Starting from the results of the previous editions, SPARK-2022 will deepen the debate on application-relevant aspects of P&S theory and practice, with the aim of reporting and discussing experiences relating to deploying P&S systems.

Topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Novel domains and benchmark or challenge problems
• Experiences in deploying P&S systems, from their conception to their maturity in practice
• Comparison with previously existing technologies and/or systems
• Integration of operational knowledge from existing legacy components
• Integration of multiple sources of knowledge and reasoning schemes (actions, time, resources)
• Modeling and domain model acquisition
• Handling dynamic and uncertain sources of knowledge
• Algorithmic and technological issues
• Plan execution and replanning
• Mixed initiative approaches
• User interface design, visualization and explanation
• Machine learning methodologies applied to P&S systems
• Engineering, deployment, and maintenance
• Evaluation, testing, and validation
• Assessment of impact on end users

Important Dates

• Paper submission: Thursday 7 April, 2022
• Notification of acceptance/rejection: Thursday 12 May, 2022
• Camera-ready paper submissions: Thursday 26 May, 2022
• Workshop date: 7-12 June, 2022

Submission Information

Submissions may be regular papers (up to 8 pages plus references) or short position papers (up to 2 pages, including references). All papers should conform to the AAAI formatting guidelines and style (except the AAAI copyright notice can be removed). Submissions will be reviewed by at least three referees. SPARK-2022 will be double blind and submissions must be anonymous and not contain author information.

Submissions, in PDF format, must be submitted via the EasyChair site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=spark2022

The site is open for submission

Diversity

The SPARK workshop has a positive history of diversity within the organising committee, programme committee and attendees, including individuals of different gender, race, nationality, and at different stages in their career. However, to ensure SPARK remains and progresses to being more diverse, part of the organiser's responsibility this year will be to ensure that SPARK has:

• A programme committee that has true diversity, consisting of an equal split of gender and inclusion of under-represented gender identifications, where possible and without positive discrimination. A maximum of three reviewers from any country. This will be done based on the country of their main residing organisation. Of the three, there must only be one member for the career stages of: Early, Established, Leading.
• Papers are reviewed double-blind in an attempt to ensure all submitted papers are fairly reviewed and unconscious bias is minimised.
• Presentations by accepted papers will be prioritised and balanced throughout the sessions to ensure diversity is throughout SPARK sessions.
• Diversity information will be collected on submitted papers, accepted papers, programme committee, and attendees. We will ensure consent is granted before information is collected and anonymised. We plan to publish abstract statistics as part of the SPARK proceedings to ensure transparency and as comparative future measure.

Organising Committee

• Riccardo De Benedictis, National Research Council of Italy, IT
• Simon Parkinson, University of Huddersfield, UK
• Marco Roveri, University of Trento, IT
• Sabine Storandt, Universität Konstanz, DE

Schedule (and papers)

Day 1 - June 14 -- 12:00-15:00(UTC) 14:00-17:00(CET)

12:00-13:10	Workshop opening
12:10-13:20	Session 1 - Scheduling
	Predictive Maintenance Scheduling in Twice Re-entrant Flow Shops with Due Dates Eghonghon-Aye Eigbe, Bart De Schutter, Mitra Nasri and Neil Yorke-Smith
	Scheduling Deep Learning Jobs Training in the Cloud: Comparing Multiple Approaches Michele Precuzzi, Federica Filippini and Danilo Ardagna
13:10-13:20	Break
13:20-14:50	Session 2 - Space and Robotics
	Copiloting Autonomous Multi-Robot Missions: A Game-inspired Supervisory Control Interface Marcel Kaufmann, Robert Trybula, Ryan Stonebraker, Michael Milano, Correa, Tiago S. Vaquero, Kyohei Otsu, Ali-Akbar Agha-Mohammadi and Giovanni Beltrame
	Scheduling Within a Demand Access Paradigm for NASA's Deep Space Network Nihal Dhamani, Mark Johnston and Girly Lucena
	On Bringing HTN Domains Closer to Reality - The Case of Satellite and Rover Domains Ebaa Alnazer, Ilche Georgievski and Marco Aiello
14:50-15:00	First Day - Closing remarks

Day 2 - June 15 -- 12:00-14:30(UTC) 14:00(CET)-16:30(CET)

12:00-14:20	Session 3 - Storytelling
	TattleTale: Storytelling with Planning and Large Language Models Nisha Simon and Christian Muise
	Towards Believable Non-Player Characters with Domain-Independent Planning Nicklas Slorup Johanssen, Lasse Brink Kaer, Jonas Alexander Baungaard Stolberg, Rasmus Grønkjær Tollund, Nikolaj Hyldig, Paw Oktober and Álvaro Torralba
13:00-13:10	Break
13:20-14:20	Session 4 - Novel Applications
	Fast Solution for Evacuation Shelter Closing Problem Hitoshi Shimizu, Hirohiko Suwa, Tomoharu Iwata, Akinori Fujino, Hiroshi Sawada and Keiichi Yasumoto
	Leveraging Planning Landmarks for Hybrid Online Goal Recognition Nils Wilken, Lea Cohausz, Johannes Schaum, Stefan Lüdtke, Christian Bartelt and Heiner Stuckenschmidt
14:20-14:30	Final closing remarks