(Painting by Yiannis Stavrou)
ICAPS'09 Workshop on Verification and Validation of Planning and Scheduling Systems
Planning and scheduling (P&S) systems are finding increased application in safety- and mission-critical systems that require a high level of assurance. However tools and methodologies for verification and validation (V&V) of P&S systems have received relatively little attention. The goal of this workshop is to initiate an ongoing interaction of the P&S and V&V communities to identify specialized and innovative V&V tools and methodologies that can be applied to P&S. Model-based P&S systems have unique architectural features that give rise to new V&V challenges. Most significantly, these systems consist of a planner engine that is largely stable across applications and a declaratively-specified domain model specialized to a particular application. Planners use heuristic search to compute detailed plans that achieve high level objectives stated as an input goal set. Experience has shown that most errors are in domain models, which can be inconsistent, incomplete or inaccurate models of the target domains. There are currently few tools to support the model construction process itself, and even fewer that can be used to validate the structures of the domains once they are constructed. While heuristic search has proven effective at finding plans, it is generally demonstrated only empirically that a given heuristic strategy is effective in the domains on which it is tried. As planners find wider application and problems to which they are applied become more adventurous, a second challenge to V&V in P&S systems is to demonstrate that specific heuristic strategies have reliable and predictable behaviors over their operational profile, including identification of resource constraints in both the plan generation and in the quality of the plans produced.
Proceedings are online !
ICAPS has published the proceedings on their website: link