The First Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling

We report on the staging of the first competition on knowledge engineering for AI planning and scheduling systems, held in Monterey, California, in colocation with the ICAPS 2005 conference. The background and motivation is discussed, together with the relationship of this new competition with the current international planning competition. We report on the new competition's format, its outcome, and the benefits we hope it will bring to the research area. Further, the IPC has facilitated the sharing of benchmark domain models, tasks, and planning tools through the use of PDDL. However, the narrow focus and limiting assumptions of the IPC are controversial--it encourages rapid development, but in the narrow area of fully autonomous plan generation.