Call for Papers: ICAPS 2025

Planning and Scheduling are optimisation problems which require finding a set of actions to complete a task, to achieve a goal, or to optimise one or more objectives. Effective solutions to planning and scheduling problems are critical for a variety of important application areas, including Industry 4.0, aerospace systems, supply chain management, software engineering, robotics, education, digital entertainment and more.

The International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling ICAPS is the premier forum for new research results on the theory and applications of planning and scheduling technology. The 35th edition of the ICAPS conference series will be held in Melbourne, Victoria (Australia), from November 9th to 14th, 2025. The program committee of ICAPS 2025 invites paper submissions on all aspects of automated planning and scheduling. Contributions are welcome in each of the following categories:

Theoretical papers, which broaden or improve the set of analytical tools used to study planning and scheduling problems and algorithms. Examples include complexity results, expressiveness and new theoretical frameworks.
Algorithmic papers, which describe novel perspectives and substantial (qualitative or quantitative) improvements for solving planning and scheduling problems. Examples include new optimisations or specialisations of existing algorithms, new propagators, new decomposition approaches etc.
Modelling papers, which describe new representations of planning and scheduling problems and their solutions. Examples include new mathematical frameworks for existing problems, original descriptions of emerging problems and refinements of existing frameworks for knowledge representation of actions, goals, states, or other rigorously defined concepts.
Position papers, which contribute thoughtful critiques or bold new perspectives of the field. Examples include meta-analysis of research trends, descriptions of new challenge problems suitable for planning and scheduling, historical perspectives and analysis of the field and technical discussions of various implementation techniques.
Tools papers, which describe systems that are of use and of interest to the planning and scheduling community, and which are built using novel algorithmic and engineering techniques. Examples include: integrated planning systems, model checkers and synthesis tools, libraries to construct, manage and transform representations of planning and scheduling problems, applications for visualising, benchmarking and comparing planners or other types of tools, etc.

All submissions to the main technical track must be classified in terms of one or more high-level topics, and one or more relevant subject-matter keywords, which are within the scope of the conference. A list of relevant topics and subject matter keywords are available from the ICAPS 2025 homepage.

Key Dates

The reference timezone for all deadlines is UTC-12. That is, the deadline has not passed as long as there is still time anywhere in the world.

October 1, 2024 - Submission site opens
October 25, 2024 - Abstracts due
November 1, 2024 - Full papers due (electronic submission, PDF)
November 15 2024 - Desk reject notification
December 16, 2024 - Phase 1 author notification
January 27-31, 2024 - Author feedback period
February 28, 2025 - Phase 2 author notification

The submission schedule of ICAPS 2025 is designed with authors in mind, offering multiple opportunities to revise and resubmit. For example, to ICAPS 2025 following Phase 1 reject from AAAI 2024, and to IJCAI 2025, following Phase 1 reject from ICAPS 2025.

Author Guidelines

All types of papers can be submitted as either long (8 pages AAAI style plus one page of references) or short (4 pages plus one page of references). Whether the paper is long or short must be indicated at submission time.

Over-length papers will be rejected without review. A paper is over-length whenever content other than the ethical impacts statement (see below) or acknowledgements section appears on page 9 (resp. Page 5) of long (resp. short) papers.

All papers that satisfy length and formatting requirements will be reviewed against standard criteria such as relevance, originality, significance, clarity, and soundness. Submissions are expected to meet the high standards of publication expected by ICAPS. Please refer to the for further details and reviewing guidelines.

The review process has three possible outcomes: (1) acceptance for oral presentation and inclusion in the archival proceedings of the ICAPS conference series; (2) acceptance for poster presentation and non-archival extended abstract, for dissemination via the ICAPS 2025 website; (3) rejection.

Papers submitted to ICAPS 2025 may not be submitted to other conferences or journals during the ICAPS 2025 review period, nor may they be already under review, accepted, or published in other conferences or journals.

Authors making multiple submissions must ensure that each submission has significant, unique content. Papers sharing co-authors and substantial overlap will be rejected. In case of doubt, please contact the program chairs of ICAPS 2025 before submission.

The format of ICAPS 2025 will be in-person. As such, we expect at least one author of each accepted paper to register for the conference and present their work in person, unless exceptional circumstances prevent this.

Use of Generative AI

ICAPS 2025 continues the policy adopted in 2024 regarding using large-scale language models (LLMs) and other so-called “Generative AI” tools. Papers that include text generated from an LLM are prohibited unless the produced text is presented as a part of the paper’s experimental analysis. We stress that this policy DOES NOT prohibit authors from using these technologies for editing or polishing author-written text.

This policy is in line with standing AAAI policy in that no AI system satisfies the criteria for authorship of papers published by AAAI Press (ICAPS’ publisher) and, as such, also cannot be used as a citable source in such papers.

Authors assume full responsibility for the content of submitted work, including checking for plagiarism and authenticity of all text.

Ethical / Societal Impact

Authors are encouraged to include a statement of the potential broader impact of their work, including its ethical aspects and future societal consequences. This statement can be included in either the main body pages or the reference page. Whenever such a statement is not included in the paper, but the reviewers deem that such a statement is necessary, the authors will be asked to provide one during the author response period for review. The statement will be taken into consideration as part of the reviewing process. If the paper is accepted, the statement provided will need to be incorporated into the camera-ready version.

Best Paper Awards and Journal Fast Track

Following the ICAPS tradition, we will award the best non-student and student papers. These papers may also receive an invitation to submit an extended version to a top AI journal, such as the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) or the Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ).

Submission Instructions

All submissions will be made electronically via OpenReview. Submitted papers must be anonymous for double-blind reviewing, must adhere to the page limits of the relevant submission type (long or short), and must follow the author kit instructions for formatting. We use a slightly modified version of the AAAI 2025 author kit that can be found following this link.

Authors can submit supplementary material (videos, technical proofs, additional experimental results) in addition to the PDF paper they submit. Please ensure the supporting material is anonymised unless stated otherwise for specific submission types. Papers should be self-contained; reviewers are encouraged but not obligated to consider supporting material in their decisions, with the exception of tools papers.

Failure to comply with the submission instructions above will result in desk rejection.

Double-blind requirements are satisfied whenever authors omit their names and institutions, refer to prior work by themselves or others in the third person, and ensure that the acknowledgement notices or ethics statements do not include information that may identify them. We do not discourage authors from posting their manuscripts onto Arxiv.org or other similar repositories, but we strongly suggest avoiding doing so during the bidding and paper assignment process to avoid potential reviewers receiving automated notifications within that critical time-window.

Program Chairs and Contact

Daniel Harabor, Monash University, Australia
Miquel Ramirez, University of Melbourne, Australia

For inquiries, please contact us by email: icaps25pc [at] googlegroups [dot] com

Changelog

2024-09-13 Call for Papers made public on the ICAPS 2025 website.
2024-09-23 Added explicit instructions for double-blind submissions and Arxiv.