The International Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (ICKEPS) plays a pivotal role in fostering the development of new Knowledge Engineering (KE) tools, and in emphasising the importance of principled approaches for all the different KE aspects that are needed for the successful long-term use of planning in real-world applications.  
 In this paper, as an exercise in synthesis and for the sake of stimulating thoughts and discussion, we review the format of previous ICKEPS, to suggest alternative formats for future competitions, ideally to motivate someone to step up and organise the next ones. The International Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (ICKEPS) has been running since 2005 as an almost biennial event promoting the development and importance of the use of knowledge engineering (KE) methods and techniques within this area. The aim of the competition series is to foster developments in the knowledge-based and domain modelling aspects of Automated Planning, to accelerate knowledge engineering research, to encourage the creation and sharing of prototype tools and software platforms that promise more rapid, accessible, and effective ways to construct reliable and efficient Automated Planning systems.The latest competition took place in 2016 1 BID3 , which aimed at on-site domain modelling, and highlighted a number of major issues. Most teams did not use any of the existing KE tools, and thus relied only on their expertise. Second, existing tools do not effectively support cooperation, which is needed to cope with the growing complexity of planning applications. Finally, and more worryingly, the number of participants of ICKEPS is still not very large, especially when compared with the latest edition of the International Planning Competition: this suggests that the planning community underestimates the importance of knowledge engineering, despite of its enormous impact on applicability of domain-independent planning in real-world scenarios. Accidental complexity issues BID2 , for instance, can prevent the exploitation of automated planning approaches in complex scenarios, and even an unfortunate ordering of elements in the domain model can adversely affect the performance of planning engines BID7 .Given the pivotal role played by ICKEPS in promoting the importance of principled KE approaches and tools, we believe it is important to evolve and adapt its format in order to attract and engage a larger number of participants. In this paper, we review the format of past competitions, in order to highlight weaknesses and strengths both from organisers' and participants' perspective. Building on top of this analysis, we suggest some alternative formats that may help future ICKEPS organisers in performing their tasks.It should be noted, though, that the aim of this paper is twofold: to review formats and suggest improvements to ICKEPS, and -more importantly-to make a call for action for organising future competitions focused on KE aspects of planning and scheduling. Concluding this paper, we believe that there is a strong need to organise the ICKEPS competitions in order to increase awareness of KE techniques, tool and issues in the ICAPS and general AI communities. The success of future ICK-EPS competitions (e.g. considerable increase of the number of participants) can, in consequence, influence the domainindependent AI planning field by making it accessible for use (by planning non-experts) in various application domains. To give some motivation and inspiration for the future ICKEPS competitions, we, in this paper, provided a review of the format of the past ICKEPS competitions, and suggested two possibly new formats that, we believe, can at-tract more participants and possibly avoid an excessive burden of organisers.We believe that the paper initiates a fruitful discussion about the format of future ICKEPS competitions as well as motivate potential organisers to step up and organise the next competition(s).
Ideas for future ICKEPS
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