Creating the First International Probabilistic Planning Competition

这笔小额规划拨款将支持发起第一次国际概率规划竞赛的努力，该竞赛计划与2004年自动规划与调度国际会议（ICAPS-04）一起举行。该竞赛是作为在ICAPS-04举办的第四届国际规划竞赛（IPC）的平行轨道组织的。IPC首次于1998年与人工智能计划和调度会议（AIPS）一起举行。随后的比赛在2000年和2002年举行，人们普遍认为这些比赛对规划界非常有价值，促进了算法和表示的进步，并迅速传播到整个领域。ICAPS-04的组织者将主办第四届IPC，该届IPC专注于经典规划，涉及在所有决策的影响都是确定的情况下的顺序决策。在过去的十年里，随着计算机与物理世界的结合越来越紧密，研究人员开始研究能够代表许多决策影响中固有不确定性的模型。在这种情况下，计划是通过它们实现预期结果的可能性来评估的。该领域的主要数学模型是马尔可夫决策过程（MDP）模型，世界各地都有研究小组研究MDP用于规划。然而，由于缺乏统一的进展标准和小组之间很少分享结果，该领域的进展受到抑制。概率规划竞赛可以给概率规划社区提供一个非常需要的机会，让他们走到一起，共同前进。该奖项将支持计划验证程序的改编和旅行，以促进比赛的组织。其更广泛的影响包括培训研究生和改进计算机规划系统来规划多种现实世界的活动。

This small planning grant will support efforts to launch the first international probabilistic planning competition, slated to be held in conjunction with the 2004 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-04). The competition is being organized as a parallel track of the Fourth International Planning Competition (IPC) at ICAPS-04. The IPC was first held in 1998 in conjunction with the Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling conference (AIPS). Follow-up competitions were held in 2000 and 2002, and it is widely believed that the competitions have been enormously valuable to the planning community, spurring advances in algorithms and representations and rapidly disseminating them throughout the field.The organizers of ICAPS-04 will be hosting the 4th IPC, which has focused exclusively on classical planning, involving sequential decision making when the effects of all decisions are deterministic. Over the past decade, as computers have become more and more integrated with the physical world, researchers have begun to study models that can represent the inherent uncertainty present in the effects of many decisions. In this setting, plans are evaluated by how likely they are to achieve desired outcomes. The dominant mathematical model in this community is the Markov decision process (MDP) model, and there are research groups all over the world studying MDPs for planning. However, progress in the field is inhibited by the lack of a unified metric for progress and little sharing of results between groups. A probabilistic planning competition could give the probabilistic planning community a much needed opportunity to come together and move forward. This award will support adaptation of a plan validator program and travel to facilitate organizing of the competition. Its broader impacts include training a graduate student and improvement of computerized planning systems to plan many kinds of real-world activities.