General

ICKEPS 2007 runs various simulators to be manipulated via models in integrated planning systems. These simulators will be used to evaluate plans produced by the competitors' tools, providing an (indirect) way of evaluating the KE technology used in each tool.

The interaction with the simulators is as follows:

Step 1: Download documents describing each domain and simulator API and build domain models offline. We continously provide increasing levels of difficulty for each domain, which might result in different domain models; when applicable, this will be described in the documents.
Step 2: Download problem instances. Competitors can then build solutions for each problem instance (i.e. plans) for each problem instance using their tools.
Step 3: Competitors will then upload the plans for evaluation by the simulator, which will respond with a report detailing any problems encountered with the plans, or quality scores for valid plans. Competitors can then revise their domain models and try producing new plans, repeating steps 2 and 3 as they see fit.

Interactions with the simulation environment will be logged to provide quantitative data used to evaluate the performance on the simulated domains.

Infrastructure

Simulator providers do not need to implement their own port listeners and dispatchers. They just have to be extended to read and write agreed state and plan data. As a consequence, simulators can be executed individually.

The setting that we are working with and the consequences on the hardware/software infrastructure are exposed here.

We use a small c++ server that per communicates via TCP/IP via port listening and dispatching. The simulation server (see manual for a description of its functionality)

opens a port for TCP/IP listening
for each client connecting to the server, it spawns a child process
can deal with several simulators specified in config file
starts a selected simulator and communicates via pipes
is based on a simple ASCII protocol which covers PDDL and XML
terminates child/dipatched processes on timeout

We provide a Java client as a support for the competitors to perform the connection to the server and the communication. A small-sized client called (written in Java) is provided in source code.

selects the simulator (shortcut: first letter in Manufactoring, PowerSupply, CyberSecurity, Validator, Telescope, GraphTransformation)
opens a port for TCP/IP listening
can be started from the command line (Executable, e.g. "./start_simtester P filename host port" for PSR, filename refers to the tagged client's text file containing all input information needed to feed the simulator, host and port are made available to the competitors)
can be integrated inline in a Java program (adapt Source)

It is up to the competitors to use the provided client or not, so that they can participate without using it. The only thing is to open a port to connect to the server and exchange text/file data. For this we we have given a simple ASCII-protocol to send data and command line parameter information through the net to call a simulator and receive its output.

As a consequence, one can actually operate the server via telnet.

For experimenting with the server you may also download the VEGA tool. This extended client includes functionality for displaying geometrical objects, such that simulators can - in principle - provide their internal state information to the competitors (this implies that the simulator would send commands like line and polygon)