Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling

KEPS 2026

Workshop at the 36th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS)

Room 9 at Clayton Hotel Burlington Road, Dublin, Ireland

9:00 a.m. - 5:30 p.m., June 28th 2026

Important Dates

The reference timezone for all deadlines is UTC-12. That is, as long as there is still some place anywhere in the world where the deadline has not yet passed, you are on time!

Workshop acceptance

March 10th, 2026

Call for Papers announcement

March 17th, 2026

Paper submission deadline

April 16th, 2026
April 24th, 2026

Notification of acceptance

May 20th, 2026

Call for Papers

Despite the progress in automated planning and scheduling systems, these systems still need to be fed by carefully engineered domain and problem descriptions and they need to be fine-tuned for particular domains and problems. Knowledge engineering for AI planning and scheduling deals with the acquisition, design, validation, and maintenance of domain models, as well as the selection and optimization of appropriate machinery to work on them. These processes directly influence the success of real-world planning and scheduling applications. The importance of knowledge engineering techniques is clearly demonstrated by the performance gap between domain-independent planners and planners that exploit domain-specific knowledge.

This workshop continues the tradition of several International Competitions on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (ICKEPS) and previous KEPS workshops. While ICKEPS primarily focuses on software tools and domain encoding techniques, this workshop covers all aspects of knowledge engineering for AI planning and scheduling.

Topics of Interest

▸ Formulation of domains and problem descriptions
▸ Methods and tools for acquiring domain knowledge
▸ Pre- and post-processing techniques for planners and schedulers
▸ Acquisition and refinement of control knowledge
▸ Formal languages for describing domains
▸ Re-use of domain knowledge
▸ Translators from domain-specific languages to solver-ready models (e.g., PDDL)
▸ Formats for the specification of heuristics, parameters and control knowledge for solvers
▸ Import of domain knowledge from general ontologies
▸ Ontologies describing planner and scheduler capabilities
▸ Automated reformulation of planning problems
▸ Automated knowledge extraction processes
▸ Domain model, problem, and plan validation
▸ Visualization methods for domain models, search spaces and plans
▸ Mapping domain properties and planning techniques
▸ Plan representation and reuse
▸ Knowledge engineering aspects of plan analysis

Submission Instructions

Two types of papers can be submitted. Full technical papers with the length up to 8 pages + 1 for references, are standard research papers. Short papers with the length between 2 and 4 pages (+1 for references) describe either a particular application or focus on open challenges. All papers must be submitted in PDF format and must conform to the AAAI style template.

Submit your paper via EasyChair

Policy on Previously Published Papers: we welcome submissions based on recent publications from other (non-ICAPS) venues such as specialized conferences (e.g., AAMAS, ICRA, KR) or general AI conferences (e.g., AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI). Such submissions must clearly indicate the original venue. Submissions currently under review elsewhere are also welcome since the workshop is a non-archival venue. No copyright transfer is required. If the paper is under double-blind review at another venue, please anonymize the submission.

Schedule

Workshop Introduction

09:00 – 09:10

Session 1 · Knowledge Acquisition & Domain Learning

09:10 – 10:30

Coffee Break

10:30 – 10:50

Session 2 · Classical, Numeric & Uncertain Planning

10:50 – 12:30

Lunch Break

13:00 – 14:30

Session 3 · Scheduling & Planning Applications

14:30 – 16:00

Coffee Break

16:00 – 16:20

Session 4 · Robotics & Multi-agent Planning

16:20 – 17:30

Closing

17:25 – 17:30

Organizing Committee

Lukáš Chrpa

Czech Technical University

Lukas Chrpa

Leonardo Lamanna

Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Leonardo Lamanna

Ron Petrick

Heriot-Watt University

Ron Petrick

Mauro Vallati

University of Huddersfield

Mauro Vallati

Tiago Vaquero

NASA JPL, Caltech

Tiago Vaquero

Program Committee

Diego Aineto

Universitat Politècnica de València

Roman Barták

Charles University

Luigi Bonassi

University of Oxford

Matteo Cardellini

Università degli Studi di Genova

Sandra Castellanos-Paez

Grenoble Computer Science Laboratory, Université Grenoble Alpes

Lukáš Chrpa

Czech Technical University in Prague

Emanuele De Pellegrin

University of Edinburgh

Susana Fernandez

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Mary Ellen Foster

University of Glasgow

Jeremy Frank

NASA

Richard Freedman

Smart Information Flow Technologies, LLC

Raquel Fuentetaja

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Alba Gragera

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Lorenzo James

IESEG School of Management

Alessandro La Farciola

Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Leonardo Lamanna

Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Lee McCluskey

University of Huddersfield

Eva Onaindia

Universitat Politècnica de València

Andrea Orlandini

CNR

Simon Parkinson

University of Huddersfield

Francesco Percassi

University of Huddersfield

Ron Petrick

Heriot-Watt University

David Smith

Independent

Roni Stern

Ben Gurion University of the Negev

Elisa Tosello

Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Mauro Vallati

University of Huddersfield

Tiago Vaquero

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech