The ICAPS Best Dissertation Awards honor outstanding PhD theses in any area of automated planning and scheduling.

The Awards Committee praises the following accomplishments:

The dissertation stands out by covering a lot of ground:
1) It formalizes and develops planning with hierarchical task networks (HTNs) toward a hybrid formalism that includes partial-order causal link planning;
2) it presents complexity results for the resulting problem classes;
3) it develops heuristics for hybrid planning;
4) it describes the implementation of a hybrid planner and its integration into a companion device that assists in the set-up of a home theater system; and
5) it performs a user study to evaluate the system.
The dissertation also rekindled interest in HTN planning by putting it on firm formal ground and connecting it to recent developments in classical planning.