===================================================================== 2026 INTERNATIONAL PLANNING COMPETITION (IPC 2026) NUMERIC TRACK Preliminary Schedule and Call for Domains ===================================================================== We are delighted to announce that the International Conference on Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) 2026 in Dublin will host the next iteration of the numeric track of the International Planning Competition (IPC). The objective is to empirically evaluate state-of-the-art planning systems on a number of benchmark problems. The goals of the IPC are to promote planning research, highlight challenges in the planning community, and provide new and interesting problems as benchmarks for future research. Call for domains instructions ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ If you are interested in designing a domain for the competition, or you already have something to share, please contact us before the Domain submission deadline (see below). We will then run some checks to see if the domain is suitable for the IPC, and ask you to think about the ability to easily scale problem difficulty. If you don't have a domain yourself, but you can think of someone who might have an interesting planning problem, please share this call with them. While not necessary, it is desirable for the domains to be related to real applications. Moreover, if a domain-dependent planner for the submitted domain is available, please include it in the submission. We will consider all submissions and select the highest quality subset to be included. We are aware that participants who submit a domain that is used have some advantage with respect to performance on that domain. We view this as a good incentive for teams to submit high-quality proposals. Since one of the goals of the IPC is to provide a new (publicly available) set of benchmarks for future research, we plan to publish all domains selected for IPC 2026 in a public repository. By submitting a domain, you agree to this and give us the right to do so. We recommend that you also license your domain under a permissive license such as CC-0 so that others can use and build on your domain. If you have a domain in mind, but have doubts about whether it would be appropriate for the IPC, don't hesitate to contact us! PDDL fragment and tracks ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ We will adopt the same numeric fragment of the last IPC (see https://ipc2023-numeric.github.io/). That is, we target two fragments of PDDL2.1 level 1, which are referred to as Simple and Linear Numeric Planning (SNP and LNP). As you may be well aware, SNP allows linear expressions in preconditions and goals and restricts actions’ effects to increase or decrease variables by a constant, while LNP also allows linear expressions in the right-hand side of actions’ effects. Moreover, actions will have an associated state-independent non-negative cost, so optimal plans are those where the sum of action costs is minimal. We plan to have three different sub-tracks: Optimal, Satisficing, and Agile, depending on the number and type of submissions received. Preliminary schedule ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Domain submission deadline: March 31, 2026 Planner submission deadline: May 10, 2026 Planner abstract submission deadline: June 10, 2026 Contest run: May - June, 2026 Results announced: June, 2026 Registration - we will soon share the instructions for the registration process via email and on the website for the competition (https://ipc2026-numeric.github.io/). Luigi Bonassi (luigibonassi@robots.ox.ac.uk) Francesco Percassi (f.percassi@hud.ac.uk) Joan Espasa Arxer (jea20@st-andrews.ac.uk) Enrico Scala (enrico.scala@unibs.it) =====================================================================