The Deterministic Part of the Seventh International Planning Competition would have not been the same without the collaboration of a long list of people. Therefore we wanted to include this section in appreciation of all the assistance provided by them.
First of all, we want to express our most sincere thanks to all the people who submitted a planner to the Competition.
Also, to all of you who suggested a domain to be included in the tracks, even if some were not accepted in the end: Bharatranjan Kavuluri suggested the matchcellar domain; Frédéric Maris sent us the cooking and temporal machine shop domains; Jörg Hoffmann and Hootan Nakhost devised the nomystery specification; Ron Petrick submitted the domain crisp; Héctor Geffner and Nir Lipovetzky coded the visit-all domain; Amanda Coles and Andrew Coles sent us the market domain; Héctor Luis Palacios prepared various conformant domains such as 1-dispose, dispose, grid, look-and-grab, push-to and classical; Bhaskara Marthi is behind the tidybot domain; Guy Shani shall be acknowledged for sending the domains colorballs doors, medicalPKS150, medicalPKS199, sliding-doors, unix and wumpus. At last, but not least, Tomás de la Rosa worked in the floortile domain.
We do also want to explicitly express our gratitude to Derek Long for his assistance and support with the automated validation tool VAL.
Also, to Daniel L. Kovacs for making available through the wiki site of the Competition a couple of manuscripts with a formal specification of PDDL 3.1.
Besides, we do feel in debt with Óscar Pérez, Jaime Pons, Roberto Fuentes and, in general, to the Laboratory of the Computer Science Department of the University Carlos III de Madrid for their assistance in installing, configuring and maintaining the cluster.
Very importantly as well, to the IPC council for providing extensive comments and offering a lot of helpful suggestions. In particular, to Malte Helmert for inviting us to his university, his assistance with so much insight and all the material produced at the previous IPC.
To all the members of the Planning and Learning research group (PLG) of the University Carlos III de Madrid for their encouragement and, in so many cases, for being in charge of our daily duties to allow us to work in the Competition. In particular, to Daniel Borrajo for all the support.
A special mention shall be done in this document to Malte Helmert (again) for granting us access to his svn repository and all the code in general that he developed for the Sixth International Planning Competition. In fact, his name is preserved as well in a number of source files developed in the code for the Seventh International Planning Competition. Besides, Sergio Jimenez found a number of bugs and made a lot of nice suggestions during the design and development of all of these packages.
Finally, we have to acknowledge the sponsorship of Decide Soluciones, iActive, the University Carlos III de Madrid and ICAPS. The hardware platform used during the competition was funded by Spanish Science Ministry under project MICIIN TIN2008-06701-C03-03.