Following a well established tradition, ICAPS 2005 involves a System Demonstrations (SD) session being rich of interesting presentations. This year's SD program comprises eight demonstrations, mainly focusing on space and satellite applications, but also covering training, crisis management, mixed-initiative planning, web service composition and new planning algorithms.
In particular, Daniel Tran and his colleagues present the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment (ASE), currently flying onboard the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) spacecraft. They demonstrate the potential for future space missions to use onboard decision making to respond autonomously to capture short-lived science phenomena. Their demonstration will include a live ASE contact from EO-1, as well as a full autonomous science scenario, during which ASE will command (a simulated) EO-1 to image science targets, process and analyze data and re-plan operations based on science results.
John Jaap and Patrick Meyer present Nexus, a P&S system supporting comprehensive modeling of tasks and resources, multi-user environment, remote/distributed access and incremental scheduling. Nexus aims at being a new P&S paradigm used directly by the end-users to produce their own timelines, e.g. by astronauts in space to schedule their own activities.
Ari Jonsson and his colleagues present MAPGEN, a mixed initiative activity plan generation system that is used in the Mars Exploration Rover mission surface operations to build activity plans for each of the rovers, each Martian day. The system supports activity plan editing and resource modeling together with an advanced constraint-based reasoning and planning module that supports building plans in an interactive fashion. The demo will show how the system has been used for actual Mars rover operations.
Tania Bedrax-Weiss and her colleagues present EUROPA2, an expressive and reusable platform that provides plan database services for building P\&S systems. EUROPA2 treats planning as a dynamic constraint satisfaction problem, by incrementally adding constraints and variables as actions are selected to be in the plan. EUROPA2 has been used in LORAX, an ASTEP project concerning microbial sampling in an Antarctic Glacier, whereas it is currently used in another project concerning advanced robotic capabilities in the field.
Froduald Kabanza and his colleagues present Roman Tutor, a system aiming at teaching astronauts how to operate a robot manipulator deployed on the International Space Station. Operators must rely on cameras mounted on the manipulator and at strategic places of the environment where it operates. Roman Tutor uses a robot path-planner to automatically check errors of a student learning to operate the manipulator and to automatically produce illustrations of good and bad motions in training.
Marco Pistore and his colleagues present ASTRO, a set of tools that extend existing platforms for web service design and execution with automated composition and execution monitoring functionalities. ASTRO extends the Active WebFlow platform, a commercial tool for designing and developing BPEL4WS processes. The demo consists of a set of steps corresponding to the execution of service compositions and a monitor synthesis task.
Luis Castillio and his colleagues present SIADEX, an integrated framework to support decision making during crisis episodes, by providing realistic temporally annotated plans. SIADEX implements a forward state-based HTN temporal planner and a knowledge base in Prot\'eg\'e format. It also makes intensive use of web services to implement most of its capabilities, thus allowing accessing them from any device with internet connectivity.
Finally, Yixin Chen and his colleagues demonstrate SGPlan, a PDDL2.2 planner working by partitioning problem constraints by their subgoals into multiple subsets, solving each subproblem individually and resolving inconsistent global constraints across subproblems based on a penalty formulation. SGPlan won the first prize in the suboptimal metric track and a second prize in the suboptimal propositional track in the 4th International Planning Competition, 2004.
Before closing this quick introduction to this year's demonstrations, I have to thank all presenters for the time they have invested to make this event successful. I hope that this quick introduction has excited your interest in having a more thorough look at the short papers that follow in this booklet, and, furthermore, in attending the live demonstrations that promise to be fascinating. The presenters and I will wait you there!