  This paper reports the outcome of the third in the series of biennial
international planning competitions, held in association with the International
Conference on AI Planning and Scheduling (AIPS) in 2002. In addition to
describing the domains, the planners and the objectives of the competition, the
paper includes analysis of the results. The results are analysed from several
perspectives, in order to address the questions of comparative performance
between planners, comparative difficulty of domains, the degree of agreement
between planners about the relative difficulty of individual problem instances
and the question of how well planners scale relative to one another over
increasingly difficult problems. The paper addresses these questions through
statistical analysis of the raw results of the competition, in order to
determine which results can be considered to be adequately supported by the
data. The paper concludes with a discussion of some challenges for the future
of the competition series.
