The International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) Influential Paper Awards honour significant and influential papers published at least ten years earlier in a planning and scheduling conference.

Alumnus Ronald Petrick (PhD 2006) and Professor Fahiem Bacchus received ICAPS' Influential Paper Award of 2018 for A knowledge-based approach to planning with incomplete information (AIPS 2002). Petrick is now an assistant professor in the school of mathematical and computer sciences at Heriot-Watt University. He is also a member of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics.

This paper introduced the approach for handling incomplete information in planning that is currently known as “compilation at the knowledge level”. In this approach relevant features of the belief state for the agent are represented by a collection of propositional fluents whose truth-value expresses the validity of a fixed set of formulas in modal logic interpreted over the set of all possible worlds. Updates to the knowledge of the agent triggered by the execution of actions and sensing of observations are then translated into updates to the propositional fluents. This novel representation permits planners to avoid complex and inefficient representations of belief states, and allows the compilation of planning problems with incomplete information into deterministic classical planning problems. This representation allowed the development of several more recent powerful and efficient planners that handle incomplete information.

The award was presented at ICAPS 2018, held June 24-29, at the Delft University of Technology in Delft, The Netherlands.

Congratulations to the researchers!