In the last ten years, there has been increasing awareness of the importance of integrating planning and scheduling techniques. In fact such integration may create a useful premise for addressing very complex real problems (e.g., the control of various autonomous systems). At present examples of the integration exist in some software architectures but the understanding of the theoretical basis of this integration is at an early stage. Many relevant questions remain open, such as: the role of constraint-satisfaction techniques as the common root for such integration; the issue of interleaving planning and scheduling versus actually integrating them; the role that languages for describing the domain features play in planning and scheduling; and the analysis of the classes of problems where such integration is actually needed.

When considering the solution of a given planning/scheduling problem in isolation, a natural measure of solution quality is plan minimal length. When problem solving is performed within the broader perspective of a plan life-cycle, other metrics become relevant. One class of such metrics concerns plan robustness, where robustness might be broadly defined as the ability of a plan to be resistant to changes over its lifetime. The concept of robustness is implicitly contained in some current research but an explicitation of the problems it involves requires attention. We would like to create an opportunity for discussing issues related to plan/schedule robustness in the large, including the development of clear definitions of and evaluation metrics for robustness, the design of methods for producing "robust plans", clarification of the role of formal verification and validation in this concern, and comparison of the differences that may exist between robust planning and scheduling.

The same standards will be applied to papers whether or not they are on the special topics.