Reviewing at ICAPS 2026

Scope of the Conference

ICAPS-26 welcomes submissions on all aspects of automated planning and scheduling, interpreted broadly to encompass a variety of decision-making and optimization problems involving action selection and timing. This includes domain modeling, plan and schedule synthesis, execution and monitoring, failure diagnosis, model repair, and associated learning, representation, and reasoning problems. ICAPS welcomes work on both deterministic and stochastic sequential decision-making, both with and without full observability, and both with and without factored state representations. We welcome theoretical work, experimental work, and work on applications. Work raising novel challenges and perspectives for the field is especially encouraged. Work that does not clearly connect to automated planning or scheduling will be rejected without review.

Reviewing Criteria

ICAPS-26 seeks papers that make significant contributions, are written clearly, and that acknowledge previous work appropriately. Significance involves not only novelty but potential impact on the field.

Policies

  1. By submitting or reviewing work at ICAPS-26, you agree to be bound by the ICAPS code of conduct and by the ICAPS COI policy.
  2. Authors and reviewers are expected to follow the AAAI-26 policies regarding use of AI-generated work: papers and reviews must be human-written but AI tools may be used to polish the author-written text.
  3. Papers that violate our submission or formatting rules may be rejected without review.

Instructions for Reviewers

We expect every reviewer to uphold ICAPS’s tradition of excellent reviewing. Reviews must be:

  1. constructive: Please do not just identify problems but advise how to fix them and how to improve the paper.
  2. precise: For example, please do not merely complain of `lack of novelty’, but provide specific citations to previous work that the authors might not be aware of.
  3. realistic: Please do not request additional material without advice on what to remove to make room.
  4. Please write a review that you would want to receive: note both strengths and weaknesses of the work.
  5. Please think twice before claiming that the work is out of scope for ICAPS or not an “ICAPS-type” paper. Note that ICAPS-26 takes a broad view of planning and scheduling.
  6. Please remember that ICAPS, in addition to valuing papers that close existing open problems, also values papers that open new questions to investigation and suggest new approaches. These papers will likely have strengths and weaknesses very different from conventional approaches and typical papers.
  7. Papers should be readable and understandable by researchers in the broad field of planning & scheduling. Lack of clarity in writing may predict lack of clarity in presentation at the conference. If you don’t understand the paper after exerting significant effort, lack of clarity may be a significant weakness of the paper and should likely be noted in your review.
  8. Please clearly list any specific questions whose answers would directly influence your accept/reject recommendation. The authors can address these during the author response period.
  9. Do not hesitate to advocate for a paper that you enjoyed reading and/or learned something interesting from!
  10. Do not hesitate to advocate against a paper that is confusing and hard to understand or that addresses a conventional problem with conventional methods and whose results are unsurprising.
  11. Note that typically very few papers are nominated for the best paper award. Please consider whether each paper that you review may be among the most interesting that you’ve reviewed this year. If so, nominate it!

And finally, if you haven’t received a bunch of lousy reviews recently, please refresh your knowledge of common mistakes reviewers make.