The aim of the Intention Progression Competition is to incentivise and facilitate research around the multi-faceted problem of intention progression.
The competition will:
Researchers working in multi-agent systems and the AI planning and scheduling communities, particularly those working on intention progression, and online planning and scheduling.
Competition entries take the form of a solver for intention progression problems. The solver forms a part of a simple agent that operates in a simulated environment. The agent, environment and problem instances are specified as part of the competition.
At run-time, the agent is asked to achieve a set of goals using a set of pre-specified plans (given in the form of goal-plan trees) in the environment. Not all goals in a problem instance are given initially: the agent may be asked to achieve additional top-level goals at run-time.
The agent in turn asks the solver which intention to progress next. The solver must return the next basic action in one of the agent's currently active plans (if execution has reached a subgoal in a plan, this involves choosing an appropriate plan for the subgoal and returning the first action of that plan). The agent and solver communicate via a socket using a simple JSON/XML API.
The agent then returns the selected action to the environment for execution. If the preconditions of the action hold in the current environment state, the environment is updated with the action's postconditions. The environment is dynamic: in addition to applying the postconditions of the action, the environment may change spontaneously.
The cycle repeats until all the agent's goals have been achieved, none of the agent's intentions can be progressed or a timeout is reached.
Check out the Downloads area for information about data formats, sample problems, and submission requirements. Answers to some common questions can be found in the FAQ.
If you have questions please contact us.
To register your interest in the IPC, complete the form on the registration page. (Note: registering your interest does not imply a commitment to participate in the competition.)
Following registration, you will receive access to the entrants' portal which contains all of the relevant competition resources.
The first IPC is being organised by a group of volunteers interested in the Intention Progression Problem. The organising committee is responsible for preparing intention progression problems used in the competition, hosting the competition platform, evaluating the final submissions, and making the results and submissions available after the competition.
| Organisers | |
|---|---|
| Rafael C. Cardoso | University of Aberdeen |
| Simon Castle-Green | University of Nottingham |
| Alexander Dewfall | University of Nottingham |
| Brian Logan | University of Aberdeen |
The IPC activity is overseen by an international steering committee. The role of the steering committee is to agree on the rules of the competition and recruit an organising committee for each competition. Members of the steering committee have fixed terms, and are periodically replaced by organisers and/or entrants who have participated in several editions of the competition.
| Steering Committee | |
|---|---|
| Rafael Bordini | PUCRS, Brazil |
| Mehdi Dastani | Utrecht University, Netherlands |
| Nick Hawes | University of Oxford, UK |
| Gal Kaminka | Bar Ilan University, Israel |
| Brian Logan | University of Aberdeen |
| Alessandro Ricci | University of Bologna, Italy |
| Mak Roberts | Naval Research Laboratory, USA |
| John Thangarajah | RMIT University |
| Michael Winikoff | Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand |
| Neil Yorke-Smith | Delft University of Technology |