HPlan
ICAPS Hierarchical Planning Workshop 2022 (HPlan 2022)

An ICAPS'22 Workshop
Singapore
June 20 or 21, 2022

The motivation for using hierarchical planning formalisms is manifold. It ranges from an explicit and predefined guidance of the plan generation process and the ability to represent complex problem solving and behavior patterns to the option of having different abstraction layers when communicating with a human user or when planning co-operatively. The best-known formalism in the field is Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning. In addition, there are several other hierarchical planning formalisms, e.g., hybrid planning (incorporating aspects from POCL planning), Hierarchical Goal Network (HGN) planning (incorporating a hierarchy on goals), or formalisms that combine task hierarchies with timeline planning (e.g. ANML). Hierarchies induce fundamental differences from classical planning, creating distinct computational properties and requiring separate algorithms from non-hierarchical planners. Many of these aspects of hierarchical planning are still unexplored. Thus, we encourage any contribution, independent of the underlying hierarchical planning formalism, and want to provide a forum for researchers to discuss the various aspects of hierarchical planning.
Topics of Interest

Topics of interests include but are not limited to:

theoretical foundations, e.g., complexity results
heuristics, search, and other solving techniques for plan generation
techniques and foundations for providing modeling support
challenges and lessons learned from modeling systems (using hierarchical models)
applications of hierarchical planning
plan explanation for hierarchical models
hierarchical plan repair techniques
techniques for verifying solutions of hierarchical planning problems
techniques for automated learning and synthesis of hierarchical models

Submission Details

The formatting guidelines (author kit, etc.) are the same as for ICAPS 2022. Like at the main conference, there will be a high quality double-blind review process against the standard ICAPS criteria of significance, soundness, scholarship, clarity, and reproducibility. However, submissions may be less evolved than at the main conference.

We have two categories:

Technical research papers (short or long) and
Challenge papers (short).

Technical research papers are just like standard conference papers, but may be less evolved. The purpose of challenge papers is to report on or to make aware of interesting/important problems in Hierarchical Planning and to encourage discussion at the workshop -- not to present some significant contribution.

Authors may submit *long papers* (up to 8 pages plus up to one page of references) or *short papers* (up to 4 pages plus up to one page of references). The purpose of short papers is to encourage publications of more preliminary results; challenge papers need to be short papers. In case of acceptance, the full 9, resp. 5, pages can be used for the paper, most notably to address the reviewers' comments.

Papers must be completely anonymous to enable double-blind reviewing. Submissions will be made via easychair, we provide a link in time.

If you are interested in presenting work that was accepted or published at a top-tier conference or journal, please contact the organizers. We will not include such a paper into our proceedings, but we are happy to discuss options for presenting such work.
Policy on Previously Published Material and Double-Submissions

Please be aware that we put all accepted papers into a single proceedings that we will make publicly available (check out previous years' editions if interested). This proceedings is non-archival meaning that you will keep all copyrights. However we will strictly not include any paper where at the time of putting the proceedings online, portions of that paper are under the copyright of some other publisher. The reason is that normally the rights granted to the authors are rather restricted; they might be allowed to upload the specific entire paper on their own institution's webpage, but this does not include allowing others (like us workshop organizers) to distribute that material or parts of it. This means that all submitted work must be entirely original -- just as at any conference. If in doubt, contact the organizers.

We do allow and also explicitly encourage the submission of papers that at the time of submission are under review at another conference. Note that other conferences usually allow material that is under review at a workshop in parallel, but do not allow papers currently being under review at another archival conference or journal (HPlan is non-archival). If however the paper is also accepted at the respective conference, it will not be included in our proceedings to prevent any possible copyright infringements. We will still mention the paper as being accepted at the workshop and expect the paper be part of the program (and thus presented like all other papers), but no final paper can be submitted for our workshop/proceedings. Instead, the proceedings will include links to the respective conference paper version. Please check out websites and proceedings of the previous years to see examples of how this looks.